[Info-vax] Moving away from OpenVMS

[Ken Fairfield]

On Thursday, May 24, 2012 2:38:12 PM UTC-7, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> 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.

DECnet node names.

> 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.

Yeah, I expect this goes back to the 36 bit machines.  DECnet
is supported (first appeared?) on PDP-10, then that 6-character
restriction was carried forward to VMS (and PDP-11 operating
systems) so that all of them could talk to each other.

   -Ken