From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: bqt@update.uu.se (Johnny Billquist) Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2016 22:29:15 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] DEC filenames In-Reply-To: <20160326210306.GC12921@mercury.ccil.org> References: <56F6F150.8020906@update.uu.se> <20160326210306.GC12921@mercury.ccil.org> Message-ID: <56F6FF2B.4070001@update.uu.se> On 2016-03-26 22:03, John Cowan wrote: > Johnny Billquist scripsit: > >> SIXBIT dominated here for a long time. We see it both in the PDP-8, >> but also the PDP-6 and its follow ons. RAD50 was the natural >> extension of SIXBIT on a machine that did not have a word size that >> was a multiple of 6. > > Well, for identifiers, yes. But SIXBIT was quite general, especially > if you repurposed two of the characters to mean "end of string" and > "CR+LF". The "@" was a popular choice for the former, perhaps because > its encoding is 00; IIRC, "_" was popular for the latter. Well, I was talking filenames (as also the subject says)... :-) On the PDP-8, you sometimes saw @ used as a prefix character in SIXBIT. So you'd use @M to get a CR, and @J for an LF, and @@ would mark the end of the string. But not for filenames. But in code, since you sometimes used SIXBIT for string constants as well. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol