[Info-vax] Anyone interested in another public access system

[Bob Koehler]

In article <grql8e$26k$1 at naig.caltech.edu>, glen herrmannsfeldt <gah at ugcs.caltech.edu> writes:
> 
> It is for VMS, where the underlying hardware consists of
> 512 byte blocks.  It is much more interesting for 
> IBMs MVS, where the hardware allows variable block length
> chosen by the program.  (Between 1 byte and the track length.)

   On both VMS and MVS, I can setup the file system to use just about
   any logical block size that I want.  On those, and on UNIX systems, the
   underlying disk sector size is often 512 bytes and physical block sizes
   multiple of those.  And when I set up UFS or something similar on UNIX, 
   I can tell the UNIX kernel to use lots of different logical block and
   fragment sizes.

   It's only the lack of organisation at the API level that forces 
   UNIX programmers to think only in stream of bytes.