[ale] Segue from MS threatening the community

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 09:12 -0400, Thompson Freeman wrote:

> DOS did start life as a CP/M type operating system, since  
> CP/M was slow getting into the 16 bit arena. CP/m was  
> strongly influenced by the DEC operating system RT-11, if I  
> remember correctly. The DOS filesystem became a cross  
> between Unix and RT-11 with ver 2.0, when the subdirectory  
> showed up, but Microsoft has never lost DEC's use of  
> logical devices as part of the filesystem (C: drive and so  
> forth.) Unfortunately, MS has never seen fit to enable the  
> only real nice part of DEC's logical device naming ability,  
> and stuck with the limited A:-Z: drive scheme, 


Oh how I wish I could remember the details, but some versions of DOS let
you map drives outside of the A:-Z: range, even if you couldn't always
*get* to the drive.  There was a way to make it assign drive names like
"@:".  Of course, you couldn't access those drives through COMMAND.COM,
because it would say that it was an invalid drive (because it was
supposed to be), but I think you could force programs to open files on
that drive... :-P

    --- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
                    fd0man at gmail.com
Phone: (404) 592-5746
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Demand Freedom!  Use open and free protocols, standards, and software!
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without
evidence." ?Christopher Hitchens
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