File path formats. 2402
MSCHAEF.COM The read and write keys are pbuttwords that you have to enter as part of the filename...
Thinking back to my old 8-bit Commodore days, if you were using discs:
in Basic 2:
Cbuttette tapes were numbered 1 and 2, printer was device 4, I forget what 3 was. A dual disc drive was device 8 with discs numbered 0 and 1.
load "$0", 8 (or $1 for the other drive) list
to get a directory.
load "file",8 to load a BASIC program; load "file",8,1 to load and relocate a machine-langauge program?
OPEN fileno, 8, mode, "n:FILE,type,mode" - 0 or 1 for the drive, type was "SEQ" or "REL" for sequential or random access, mode was "READ" or "WRITE".
Rich Alderson Well from what I remember of IBMs : BOS, TOS, BPS, MFT, MVT, VS1, VS2, MVS ... clan of operating systems (But not...
I forget how you moved around a random-access file under BASIC 2. It was ugly.
DOS commands went through the "command channel" - you opened a file on device 8 with mode 15, and printed commands to it - "SCRATCH file", "INIT", "NEWx:NAME" to format, "R" to rename and "C" to copy, with PIP-like syntax iirc.
Under Basic 4 they added some extra commands which were just syntactic sugar around the underlying DOS...
DIRECTORY D0 (or D1) DLOAD-DSAVE "file", D0 (or D1) DOPEN #channel, "file, mode" (APPEND also...) HEADER to format BACKUP, RENAME, SCRATCH, COPY, CONCAT, APPEND as BASIC commands RECORD to move around random-access files.
pete --
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