[lug] 14 Characters

[Jed S. Baer]

On Wed, 16 Jun 2021 17:22:47 -0600
Maxwell Spangler wrote:

> That makes me realize when I started DOS was 8.3 character size limits,
> Unix (SVR3.2 for me) was 14 characters, Mac (HFS) was 31 characters.

IIRC, RSTS allowed 6 characters, with a 3 letter extension. Probably RSX
was the same.

> It prompts me to think: how on earth did we manage with such
> limitations, but I know.. we made it work. And now, in a lot of ways
> we're much more productive because challenges like this have been
> removed.

It wasn't just file names. Variable names in old languages had limitations
as well. The old-old-old BASIC allowed a single letter or a single letter
followed by a single digit. On DEC machines, BASIC+2 allowed pretty short
variable names. And everything was upper case as well.

At the time, none of this seemed very limiting. In fact, I could argue that
my time working on DEC machines, writing mostly FORTRAN, was the most
productive time of my career. In retrospect, I think I churned out a lot
more code. Perhaps stuff I wrote later did more work, but some of that was
rendering GUIs. Cranking through more and more data was as much a function
of faster machines as anything else, but certainly a well-crafted SQL
statement was more efficient in programmer time than writing all that data
manipulation in a 3GL.

-- 
All operating systems suck, but Linux just sucks less
 - Linus Torvalds