Richard Brodie wrote:
It goes back to ancient PDP operating systems, so may well predate Unix, depending which exact OS was the first to use it.
Yes, I think it was used in RT-11, which also had block-oriented disk files. There were two kinds of devices in RT-11, character and block, and the APIs for dealing with them were quite different. They hadn't fully got their heads around the concept of "device independent I/O" in those days, although they were trying. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
