[Info-vax] Moving away from OpenVMS

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Phillip Helbig---undress to reply <helbig at astro.multiclothesvax.de> wrote:

(snip)
> So the 6-character limit for node names has another source (no pun 
> intended) than the limit on a variable name in Fortran before 
> Fortran90.

Hmmm. Fortran was developed on 36 bit machines with a 6 bit 
character set. (The IBM 704 and BCDIC.) 

DEC conveniently also build 36 bit machines that, in addition
to using ASCII (five per word) also used SIXBIT with six per word,
among other place for file names. 

It certainly wouldn't surprise me if node names could be traced
back to the PDP-10 (maybe TOPS-20), from there to its IBM ancestors, 
and then to Fortran. But note that it would be that both traced
back to 36 bit machines, but no causal relationship between them.

There are stories tracing back the size of the space shuttle
solid rocket boosters back even farther than that.

-- glen