In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 11/18/2005
at 01:29 PM, Paul Gilmartin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>Is this where I'm supposed to say, "That is not my dog!"?
No.
>It's distinctly IBM's dog,
You owe an apology to the dogs. ;-)
>I can hardly imagine a rationale for a 7-character limit,
Userids were 7 characters. It never occurred to them that there was a
need for prefixes that were not userids. Then they implemented it with
a 7-byte field *followed* by a one-byte length field.
>Was storage once, perhaps, so expensive?
No. It was carelessness, pure and simple. BTW, they've already
rejected a requirement to expand it.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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