[ale] Segue from MS threatening the community

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Fri, 2007-05-18 at 12:58 -0400, tom wrote:

> 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. 


Yep.  The devices that hold file systems are limited to 1 letter, and
devices are limited to 8 I think.  All device drivers had a name that
you can call them... for example LPT1: and PRN: were usually the same
device driver; and when you loaded a CD-ROM driver (say, OAKCDROM.SYS)
you passed it a driver name that was up to 8 characters, (say, MSCDEX01)
and then MSCDEX would attach to the driver by accessing MSCDEX01:.

It seemed that basically, it was like the concept of a /dev tree, but
instead of /dev/lpt1, you used the colon afterwards to denote the
device.  Also, I don't think DOS treated devices like files in any way.

    --- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
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