Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 15:09:35 -0400 From: "Steve Friedrich" <SteveFriedrich@Hot-Shot.com> To: "Marty Cawthon" <mrc@ChipChat.com> Cc: "freebsd" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: fragmentation Message-ID: <199809241909.PAA18198@laker.net>
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On Thu, 24 Sep 1998 10:48:59 -0400 (EDT), Marty Cawthon wrote: >> You're probably aware that DOS and Winblows use "clusters" of sectors, >> due to poor design choices by IBM/Microsoft/Intel in the initial design >> of the PC. Information is stored in disk sectors which are frequently >(chop) >> worth of sectors in the FAT table (File Allocation Table). That's an >> incredible waste of space, and products are available to shrink the >(chop) > >--------------------- >Historical Note >--------------------- > I am pretty sure that the FAT file system was developed entirely by >Microsoft - neither Intel nor IBM had any hand in its design. It is >possible that Microsoft got the basic design of FAT from Seattle >Computer Products, from whom they purchased SB-DOS and re-worked it >to be MS-DOS 1.0. > As I recall Bill Gates was personally credited with much of the >technical design of FAT. > This information is from my memory, which is neither ECC nor Parity, >but is still "PGM" - Pretty Good Memory. Yes, but Microsoft didn't create the disk controller or BIOS designs, and they factor in too... But your info is interesting and appreciated. And CPM's design factored in too. Ever hear about Control-Z ?? CPM had an end-of-file marker "in-band". Which means a character was reserved to mean EOF (I think it was control-z). And Microsoft, or the guy in Seattle that actually wrote SB-DOS (I thought he called in QDOS) ensured that it could read CPM files... It's amazing how much credit Bill gets. I think he really had little to no effect on the design of DOS. He and his mentor, wrote a BASIC interpreter (and actually, it sucked). The BASIC written for the Atari 8-bits by OSS was way more cool... Unix systems measure "uptime" in years, Winblows measures it in minutes. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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