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

[Richard B. Gilbert]

FredK wrote:
> "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88 at comcast.net> wrote in message 
> news:BtydneYdGuPi-37UnZ2dnUVZ_oydnZ2d at giganews.com...
> 
>> Isn't there an ODS-5 now?  ISTR reading about the new file system that 
>> allows all kinds of special characters in filenames.
>>
>> I've been using ODS-2 for a bit more than 23 years now.  It does just 
>> about everything I need in a file system.  Needless to say, I do NOT need 
>> files named #@!$$xqb.|\23^@# or any other such frippery!
>>
>> I know, I know, I'm hopelessly old fashioned.
> 
> ODS-5 is ODS-2 with extended name support.  Recently we've even tacked on 
> UNIX hard and soft links.
> 
> But the basic problem is that the file system is a living antique of design 
> and is very slow compared to a modern file system.
> 

I never noticed this slowness.  Perhaps I just wasn't paying attention.

What would you cite as an example of a "modern" file system?  Most Unix 
systems won't even commit your file to disk until they get around to it. 
  One of the nice things about VMS is that what you write to disk is 
actually committed to disk within a few seconds.  A power failure does 
not always require repairs to a VMS file system; something that can't be 
said for Unix.  Unix provides no means to create a contiguous file; just 
splatter it all over the disk!.  Even <obligatory retching noises> 
Windows has a utility to make your files and free space contiguous. 
Unix just doesn't care.

Except for Sun's ZFS, I think most Unix file systems have changed very 
little in the last ten or twenty years.