Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL!WANCHO From: WANCHO@WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL ("Frank J. Wancho") Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Tenex mode Message-ID: Date: 30 May 89 06:29:00 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Lines: 34 In terms of gaining access to material for downloading to **IX and **DOS environments, a system with a file structure similar to **IX or **DOS would be far more congenial. Agreed. Most of the "inconvenience" is in the str: part of the syntax, and our FTP server at least allows you to do a pseudo-connect which simply defaults that part of the pathname. Although not high on our To-Do list, but on the list nonetheless, is to add the mapping of Unix-style pathnames to TOPS20 pathnames. That should ease the pain. I'm curious: why does TOPS20 seem to be going nowhere or am I mistaken in this impression? It isn't going anywhere, and it doesn't matter. It works. >We could have run another OS on this machine, but >the filenames would have been severely contrained, among other >limiting factors. Compared to BSD **IX? Although there are other considerations in a file system, case insensitivity hardly seems a plus. The alternate OS for this machine was ITS. Its filename syntax is dsk:dir;fn1 fn2 with the space and each field limited to six characters. Each field in a TOPS20 filename is limited to 39 characters. Your comment about case insensitivity applies to MSDOS as well, which may not necessarily make it a minus, reference your congeniality comment above. --Frank