On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 22:31 -1100, david merriman wrote:
> Again, I wasn't saying that it *is* more sensible, just observing that
> people get used to "the way things are done", and tend to forget the
> historical reasons *why* they were done that way in the first place.
I agree. A lot of things are done on Unix because that is how they were
done on MULTICS and no body could be bothered changing, such as the
file-system that sprang, Athena like, into existence in 1965 [1].
Programs such as vi still have hangovers from the first text-editor for
MULTICS: QED [2]. (QED begat ed which begat ex which begat vi.)
> And what's wrong with the C:\Program Files\<Program Name>\ hierarchy
> anyway ? :-P <g,d&r>
IIRC NExT and MacOS X organise programs in a similar way, but without
the drive (which DOS inherited from CP/M).
1. Daley, R. C., and R. G. Newman. “A General Purpose File System
for Secondary Storage.” In Afips Conference Proceedings, edited
by Robert W. Rector. American Federation of Information
Processing Societies, Las Vegas, Nevada: Spartan Books,
Washington, D.C., 1965, volume 27, 213–229. Also available from
http://www.multicians.org/fjcc4.html.
2. Deutsch, L. Peter, and Butler W. Lampson. “An Online Editor”
Communications of the ACM, 10: 21, (1967) 793--799, 803
--
Michael JasonSmith http://ldots.org/
