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Re: Transport Encodings

1991-09-12 13:37:55
I claim that with the demise of Tenex, TOPS-20, and
Multics that file descriptors are much simpler in 
   Interesting.  The death announcement of one or two of these might be 
a tad premature, even if the "mortal wounds" are clear.  And Multics had 
file descriptors which might need to be transferred only at the
application level, not the operating system level, which is, at least, a
different sort of problem. 

today's Unix-only world than  they were in the past.  
Think of all that FDB information, not to mention file
page tables (remember holey files?)!  
  Unix-only, hmm?  This message comes from a not-UNIX system.  And, as a 
colleague of mine pointed out recently, there are more machines running 
the *failed* OS/2 operating system than there are machines running UNIX. 
To say nothing of what is sometimes referred to as MessDOS.  As a 
related example, Leo's organization has a rather large installed base of 
non-UNIX systems.
  The following is a file description from a non-UNIX system of which 
there are a significant number of instances on the Internet and the 
connected networks (more of them on BITNET and its connected NJE 
networks than there are IBM mainframes, and far more than UNIX).

----------------------------------
MAIL.TXT;1                    File ID:  (2375,12,0)        
Size:          354/354        Owner:    [KLENSIN]
Created:  12-SEP-1991 14:16:21.87
Revised:  12-SEP-1991 16:11:34.56 (5)
Expires:   <None specified>
Backup:    <No backup recorded>
File organization:  Sequential
File attributes:    Allocation: 354, Extend: 0, Global buffer count: 0
                    No version limit
Record format:      Stream_LF
Record attributes:  Carriage return carriage control
RMS attributes:     None
Journaling enabled: None
File protection:    System:RWD, Owner:RWD, Group:, World:
Access Cntrl List:  (IDENTIFIER=[STAFF,JCK],ACCESS=READ+WRITE+EXECUTE+CONTROL)
-------------------

With the exception of the file ID, owner, and date material and probably
the protection/ access stuff, most of this is file description I'd want
to transfer. And the things starting "File organization" and ending with
the "RMS attributes" line contain information without which the file
basically cannot be used or interpreted: it has to go either with the
file or somehow out-of-band. 

If you'll recall, there's a whole
section of FTP that was devoted (although it had weasel-wording to deny it) to
specifically Tenex and TOPS-20 file transfer.
   yes.  But, if I recall, that was not a set of file description issues 
per se, but the result of having to know/figure out whether the machine 
was a 7-bit-byte-oriented architecture or a 36-bit-word one, or to put 
that differently, whether there were really 35 or 36 bits in a word.
  Transferring non-text files between the putatively-36-bit Tenex/
TOPS-20 architecture and the putatively-36-bit Multics architecture was,
if I recall, such a joy that one could easily put off dealing with it
for weeks. 

ok, so life has gotten easier :-)
   --john

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