Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:

> I've been scratching my head asking "why doesn't Peter want to use the
> ultra-convenient directory hierarchy bestowed by Linux?" Then I
> remembered you're really an Oberon guy, and Neither ETH Oberon nor
> Project Oberon has directories, just lots and lots of files, so you
> probably want to think that way. Once upon a time I had CPM, which also
> had no directory hierarchy.

Now you’ve dragged me off down memory lane ...
The very early Mac OS didn’t have directories either. Finder had folders, but that was just a display thing for the user.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_File_System

Seems strange, but as the article says, when floppy disks only had 400kbyte of storage, it was a different world.

And before that, the DOS for the Apple ][ also didn’t have directories - and the disks were even smaller at 113k !
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS
Version 3.3 (if you had the P5a and P6a ROMs* fitted) allowed 16 sectors/track, upping capacity to a whopping 140k.
I do recall that I had non-Apple disk drives which could do 40 tracks. A bit of fiddling (edit the track count hardcoded in the disk format command) and you could format 40 track disks to get 160k.

For real incompatibility, I had a double sided drive which was rigged up (by the vendor) so it appeared as two separate drives, for 320k on a single disk, albeit as two volumes. But of course, that couldn’t be read at all on anything other than a similarly rigged double sided drive.

* And easily copyable if you had the right gear.


I recall there were third party hard disks - they had to divide the disk into separate volumes which were limited in size by the way DOS worked. According to Wikipedia, that is 400k - which was still considered massive at the time.


Ah, those were the days !


Simon