From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2016 11:13:37 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] Early non-Unix filesystems? In-Reply-To: <20160321120634.GK15457@mercury.ccil.org> References: <20160318004832.GA18245@minnie.tuhs.org> <20160318084234.GB64087@server.rulingia.com> <24e7ae828a0086db2f79ea66165b80bf.squirrel@webmail.yaccman.com> <1458323139.767071.553262498.2A8E1982@webmail.messagingengine.com> <20160321120634.GK15457@mercury.ccil.org> Message-ID: <20160322001337.GE86793@eureka.lemis.com> On Monday, 21 March 2016 at 8:06:34 -0400, John Cowan wrote: > Tony Finch scripsit: > >> I was slightly startled by the coolness of the idea when I found out that >> nvi uses Berkeley DB as its storage layer; its recno access method >> makes a text file look like a random-access array of strings. > > Classical sequential files, however, were simply random-access files > such that seeking to line n was just a matter of seeking to byte > n * MAXCHARSLINE. The last time I actually used such a thing was > on an early Tandem system when I was implementing the Software > Tools. You're presumably not talking about a Tandem format here. Were you working with Denis Winn? > Editable source used a different format, ... Presumably you *are* talking about Tandem's format here. I always looked at it as an indication of how badly optimization attempts could go wrong. The format limited line length to something less than 256 bytes (exact length was content dependent). The lines were split into groups of up to 30 bytes, 15 bytes content and up to 15 bytes trailing spaces. And this was the reason: it was a piss-poor attempt at efficient storage. The only way to access it was with a special library with procedures like EDITREAD and EDITWRITE. I still have a number of these files, and there's no easy way to convert them. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 181 bytes Desc: not available URL: