[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[chris]

On 10/10/21 01:12, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> 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.

Yes, and at the lowest level, it's completely transparent to data and
it's format. Filesystems, structure and format should be layered in top 
of that. Obvious really...

Chris