Re: file names.number of characters

[nathan@cco.caltech.edu (Nathan Mates)]

In article <ricko-070494082955@evmac22.medill.nwu.edu>,
richard overton <ricko@merle.acns.nwu.edu> wrote:
>Who is the nice person who can tell me why Macintosh allows file and folder
>names to be so much longer than DOS file and directory names? 

   MS-DOG^HS was designed as a clone of CP/M, a rather ancient,
unpowered, and short-lived OS. (It attracted a little bit of a
following for a while, but when I looked at it, it compared
unfavorably to MS-DOS (yeah, that's possible), so I never touched it
again). CP/M, due to disk space and the like, had the limitation on
chars in the filename; I'm not sure if there is an exact reason other
than the fact that only hacker types used it, and could put up with
it. The 3-char file extension is due to the fact that the set of
capital letters fills 5 bits, and so three of those fill (with some
space) 2 bytes of disk/memory space in CP/M. (Yes. They were willing
to go to such lengths just to save one byte....... Then again, MSDOS
was accepted over a much better (multitasking, no silly 640K limit,
nnice filenames (I think), and a few more features) OS because it used
16 less K than the other. MS-DOS adopted the 3-char extension, but
went to storing it as bytes, so you can have all sorts of illegal
chars in filenames.

   On the Apple II, Dos 3.3 (and its predecessors) had rather nice
(40-char) names, with no extensions; a separate byte was used to
identify what type of file it wasm

   ProDOS apparently wanted to act a little like MS-DOS or CP/M, so it
went to much more restrictive filenames, but upped the number of
filetypes and auxtypes things had. You win some, you lose some.

   Macs were designed with users in mind, theoretically. They also
had 400/800K disks from the start, so they could afford to waste
a little disk space in having nice long names. (It's also nicer on
the users). 

>I am open to both kinds of answers: the simple one and the right one.

   Hopefully, I might have given both. :)


Nathan Mates


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