[lug] 14 Characters

[Rob Nagler]

I think the more interesting thing is how many systems still have silly
limitations in them. For example, in Excel you cannot load two spreadsheets
which have the same now. This is particularly subtle, because you can load
x.csv and x.xlsx, but you can't load y/x.xlsx. The title in the Excel
window doesn't say "x.xlsx". You also can't have more than 65536 rows. Zip
files max out at 4GB. User names in various websites are limited in length.
Maximum length of a container name in Docker is 128 chars. URLs cannot be
longer than 2048 chars. That's actually a limit on some sites where they
pack so much into a URL.

Back to the past: The first Unix I used was BSD. There were the usual
limits we have today if I remember correctly. I started working at Tandem
in 1995 after having had basically no limits on file naming for most of my
career. Tandem had two operating systems at that time: a POSIX-like thing
and Guardian. At Tandem everything could be redundant, including disk
drivers. It was message based so you'd send a message to $disk to have it
do something. This might actually go to two processes, and it might
(likely) participate in a transaction. The $disk process could then have a
subvolume and a disk file, each of which could have 8 characters (letters
or numbers but nothing else), e.g. $disk.subvolum.diskfile. One of the
projects I worked on was a build system for Guardian, NT, Ultrix, HP/UX,
etc. The build system had to generate names for the source and binary files
idempotently. BTW, in order to get speed of compilation on Tandem (due to
the fact that compilations were part of a transaction, which also was true
of operating system upgrades -- think CoreOS/Atomic), you had to build in
parallel. There was no native make (and no standardized file suffixes) so
we had to build our own. It was quite an experience, but you do what you
have to do.

Rob
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