[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Sunday, October 10, 2021 at 11:44:03 AM UTC+13, Dave Froble wrote:

> But even if another "application" handles other files, there is still 
> the issue of today's disks being block based  ...

Those same block-based disks (and block-based SSDs, and what have you) work fine on POSIX/*nix/Linux OSes. They always have worked fine, and they will continue to work fine into the future.

The key point is that VMS shied away from a radical idea that Unix embraced: that the filesystem itself should abstract away the need for blocking and deblocking, and offer up a file as just a stream of n bytes, with no requirement on n being a multiple of any integer greater than 1.