On Sat, 09 Dec 2017 12:44:59 -0500, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

> Just an FYI: The Sigma was a mainframe
>
I beg its pardon: I've heard of Sigmas but never seen or used one. I sort
of assumed they were roughly equivalent to a VAX or IBM System/3 - IOW a
small one was pretty much a mini but by adding bits you could get
supermini or small/medium mainframe capabilities.

> Sigma filenames were, as I recall, 32-characters (not counting
> file-password/owner-account -- which is a misnomer as logging in
> required user-ID, billing account, and password); filename could include
> some punctuation (including ! great way to obscure a file name
> since the audio delay when listing the directory didn't reveal where in
> the name the  was hidden). Files were "owned" as their space was
> accounted for in the user's quota (deleting a large file using the
> cross-account access could temporarily result in a quota increase for
> the account that did the deletion). Obviously no protection levels other
> than the optional password field.
>
Wild! Very different from anything I've used too.

George 3 had a hierarchical filing system with :master as the root, used
only by the OS. It had two subordinates, :lib and :manager. :lib was the
top of a hierarchy holding the system software and :manager was the top
of the user hierarchy.

Users with appropriate privileges could create users under them.

These were either inferior users who were given part of their superior's
budgets for disk space, mill time and mag tapes. These were both the
user's top-level directory and his login, so recorded both his password
and his budget details.

A user could also create pseudo-users, which were just directories
belonging to the user.

File and directory names were 12 characters long and, like UNIX you could
use partial names, so

  :manager:martin:project:myfile

was the absolute name a file called 'myfile'. It could be referred to
by partial name too, so it was referred to as :project:myfile
from :martin and as myfile from :project.

There was a defined search path, so if you tried to run, say, myprog, the
search path looked locally first in the current directory, then searched
down the :lib tree and, if still not found, it searched back up the user
inheritance chain from your immediate superior directory to :manager.
This worked surprisingly well, since a co-operative group could put
common programs in the project user and know they'd always be on all
project member's search paths.

The AS/400 OS, OS/400 had three level names: username/filename/subfile
and again you referred to your own files as filename (a data file) ir
filename/subfile (a source file) but that was as far as it ever went.
Names were limited to 9 characters! System command names were actually
very logical and guessable but so short they looked like gibberish. OK,
the source editor was called EDIT, but the PL/1 compiler was called
CRTPLIPGM and after a while you saw the pattern: the COBOL compiler was
CRTCBLPGM and the RPG III compiler (ugh!) was CRTRPGPGM


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie
          | dot org

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