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Re: DOS Master, invisibility, and solutions

mdj wrote:

On Mar 20, 4:33 am, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:



It was actually the very primitive free-space management scheme that
Pascal used which required partitioning into smaller logical volumes.



No. It was the 77 file limit. The free space could always defragmented
or K)runched in Pascal tongue. There was just little point in having a
volume much bigger than 3-400k since you'd invariably run out of
directory space before you ran out of free blocks.


Well, of course there is a reasonable limit set for a small volume,
but can you imagine Krunching a 32MB volume!

It would have been trivial to increase the 77 file limit, but adding
non-contiguous files and a real disk free space allocator would have
been a whole new file system.

The Pascal file system was seen as a reasonable tradeoff for small
floppy drives, and large volumes were never in the design space.

-michael

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Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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