IBM, UNIVACSPERRY, BURROUGHS, and friends. Compare 1139

Here in alt.folklore.computers,

The clbuttic OS2200 environment had nothing like redirection or piping, either, but it's quite possible now for me to do something similar to

The original way to do the above in ECL would be something like this:

that in the example instead of the third-party BK1 and BK2 utilities.

OS2200 has a number of file formats, but the two common ones that a command-line user would see are SDF data files and "program files."

SDF data files are generic data files. They can contain just about anything as far as I know, which doesn't mean much because I'm not an expert in file formats. :-) Each SDF file has its own entry in the MFD (Master File Directory).

A program file, on the other hand, is really a single-level directory structure that contains other files (called "elements"), and while it has an entry in the MFD, the elements stored within it do not.

Elements can be of four basic types:

ABS (absolute -- an executable program file) SYM (symbolic -- a text file. There are various subtypes to identify which specific type of file it might be). REL (relocatable -- a linkable subroutine module) OMN (omnibus -- miscellaneous data files)

Most of the time a programmer will play with elements of various types living inside a program file. Elements don't have defined record sizes or anything like that. It's relatively freeform. When creating an SDF data file or a program file, though, one usually specifies a maximum size for the file, but it's easy to adjust it later.

Interesting.

I buttume it also used an environment where terminals operated in block mode, and where screens or portions of screens were sent back and forth between terminal and host instead of each character (as most Unix terms seem to want to do).

-- OS-2 + eCS + Linux + Win95 + DOS + PC-GEOS + Executor = PC Hobbyist Heaven! WARNING: I've seen FIELDATA FORTRAN V and I know how to use it! The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.7