The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: doug@cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy)
Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 4, Issue 12
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2016 22:36:24 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <201603180236.u2I2aOWf013184@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <mailman.1.1458266402.23080.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>

> Were these features [arbitrary hard links] in other contemporaneous filesystems?

Multics had arbitary "links", which were distinguished from "branches"--the
actual file. Links and branches coexisted in directories. Unix was consciously
derived from this model, but simplified so that only links have names
and branches live elsewhere (the inode list). The architecture is
described in http://www.multicians.org/fjcc4.html. This paper is
dates from 1964 or 1965; it was certainly authoritative in 1969.
I don't know whether it evolved further.

Christopher Strachey and Joe Stoy independently conceived a model
isomorphic to Unix for OS 6 at Oxford. The two systems were
essentially contemporaneous.

I am not aware of other systems that allowed multiple names for
one file, though clearly the scent was in the air at the time.

doug


      parent reply	other threads:[~2016-03-18  2:36 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
     [not found] <mailman.1.1458266402.23080.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2016-03-18  2:13 ` [TUHS] Early non-Unix filesystems? Johnny Billquist
2016-03-18  2:36   ` Charles Anthony
2016-03-18  2:36 ` Doug McIlroy [this message]

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=201603180236.u2I2aOWf013184@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU \
    --to=doug@cs.dartmouth.edu \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).