From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: dave@horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2016 01:11:07 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Early non-Unix filesystems? In-Reply-To: <82f0876de76c486a95d1091c88279546.squirrel@webmail.yaccman.com> References: <20160318004832.GA18245@minnie.tuhs.org> <20160318084234.GB64087@server.rulingia.com> <24e7ae828a0086db2f79ea66165b80bf.squirrel@webmail.yaccman.com> <1458323139.767071.553262498.2A8E1982@webmail.messagingengine.com> <82f0876de76c486a95d1091c88279546.squirrel@webmail.yaccman.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 18 Mar 2016, scj at yaccman.com wrote: > At least in my experience, editing the "deck of cards" (and certainly, > editing anything on magnetic tape) was really painful -- there was no > way to move blocks of text around -- you started at the beginning of the > file and had to edit lines in order (one shot per line) until you got to > the end. You could add lines or delete them, but only when you came to > them. The editor copied the edited file into an output file, and then > you had to do another step to copy the new version back over the > original one. Memories of IEBUPDTE come to me... A very useful program, when it came to doing things, ahem, not allowed by the computer centre, by us Comp Sci kiddies... Ah, the time I got SPITBOL to work beyond its use-by date, for example; the thing was riddled with date checks (the first one was obvious, but the rest not so much; its endearing habit was to jump to whatever was in R0 at the time). I wrote something that searched for that particular date string, and after inspecting the surrounding binary code I patched it... > The first time I tried to edit the deck on disc, I specified the output > file to be equal to the input file. The program did not check this, and I > ended by nuking about 20% of the card images! Luckily I had a listing... > I punched out the trash on the disc and spent an entire weekend > rearranging and repunching the cards to get back to where I had been... [...] And who here hasn't done "cat file ... > file"? > It just goes to show that I should have taken my mother's advice -- > before you throw out a deck of cards, put a rubber band around it! Walking down the corridors of Comp Sci, a student in front of me dropped his entire deck of approx 2000 cards, all over the floor... I have no idea whether he got them sorted, but I sure as hell used rubber bands after that! -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."