[ale] Segue from MS threatening the community

[tom]

On Fri, 18 May 2007, Michael B. Trausch wrote:

> 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

Well, under RT-11, you could create a logical drive of "IDX:" to hold all 
of your database index files. When you over crowded your 5 Meg hard disk, 
you simply migrated the index files to another, less crowded, drive, and 
redefined the logical drive. I was able to make use of that particular 
trick three of four times (although I was supposed to be a chemist at the 
time).

Be aware that creating a logical drive did not remap or interfere with 
other logical drive definitions. You could have a dozen or more logical 
drives pointed to, say "RLO1:", which was itself just a logical drive. I 
prefer, personally, the Unix single directory tree, but DEC had a rather 
nice approach.

That said, I thought/think that the MS drive designations pretty much were 
limited to 1 character, except for the con: prn: and such devices.