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

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Bill Gunshannon <billg999 at cs.uofs.edu> wrote:
(snip, I wrote)
 
>> I would expect all systems from the time of small memory
>> to have some way to efficiently store small files and
>> access them.
 
> You would expect so.  MSDOS being the odd man out.  Ever create a
> disk with a whole lot of small files on it? (Like the source for
> MS-Kermit!)

The one I remember from MS-DOS is that it keeps a pointer as
to where to allocate next.  It doesn't reset that pointer when
files get deleted, but keeps allocating from the end.

Some time ago, I would write floppies readable on DOS or
Unix.  The unix version used dd with the appropriate offset,
which I had to know to go into the documentation, and the
file had to be contiguous.  Deleting all the files and writing
to the disk didn't guarantee that it would write from the beginning
of the data area.  (After the FAT and root directory.)

Since HPFS and NTFS I haven't worried about fragmentation much.
They aren't perfect, but it is rarely a big problem.

-- glen