From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: paul.winalski@gmail.com (Paul Winalski)
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2018 19:23:18 -0400
Subject: [TUHS] long lived programs
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References: <1522962186.9871.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org>
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On 4/5/18, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
> Case folding I find funnier however. Back in the days of 5 and 6 bit codes,
> particularly when file names were stored in things like rad50 it made
> perfect sense.   The basic character code did not handle upper and lower
> well, and many keyboards were only one case anyway.   But by the time of
> the 8 bit byte, CP/M and it's child DOS, blindly follow along.  Instead of
> thinking why it was done and since we have a new file system format and
> thinking -- hmmm maybe we don't need to have the same limitation.
>
Maybe CP/M and DOS stored file names internally in rad50 or some other
compressed form, to save space?  The first PCs didn't have much memory
(64K), and floppies didn't have much capacity.  It was a throwback to
the "every bit counts" design and programming days of the 60s/early
70s.

-Paul W.