5 ms·

> why 8.3 filenames Why is that, exactly? I grew up in that era, I remember when floppies were actually floppy, and I've been well into computers ever since,

> why 8.3 filenames Why is that, exactly? I grew up in that era, I remember when floppies were actually floppy, and I've been well into computers ever since, but I don't believe I could tell you why. If I had to guess, I'd guess that FAT used a fixed number of bytes for each filename.

jclulow 9y ago
It did.
northwest66 9y ago
Yep you got it. My first actual PCs (I don't count the Apricot PCs haha) were DOS 3.3, and I still remember the transition away from 33MB partitions although it's so long ago I can't remember if that came in with DOS 4.0 (abort abort!) or 5. I thought I was so cool having a PC with drives A B C D E F G H I.
- u801e 9y ago
  I had a 486 PC with a 100 MB hard drive running Dos 5.x (can't recall the minor version). The hard drive was definitely a single partition.
- FranOntanaya 9y ago
  Oh man, rich kids had a D: drive. The rest of us had to make do with A: and C:
skookumchuck 9y ago
It was 6.3 before that. The PDP-10 system :-)
- HankB99 9y ago
  Didn't that include a ';' and version number too? (Or was that later - RSX-11M on a PDP 11/23)
  - skookumchuck 9y ago
    I think that was later.
- kbob 9y ago
  I don't know about PDP-10s. DEC's PDP-11 operating systems used a character set called RAD-50, short for radix (octal) 50, for filenames and various other purposes. The (decimal) 40 characters were A-Z, 0-9, and four punctuation characters -- I don't remember which. Three characters could be stored in a 16 bit word, so a 6.3 filename required 3 words or 6 bytes. The '.' separator was not stored, of course. The implementers of CP/M or one of those early PC OSes copied the idea but not the encoding and picked 8.3 as a slightly more usable size. Floppy drives were relatively capacious (!) so bigger filenames were reasonable. The only reason I know this PDP-11 trivia is that end users could recompile the RT-11 kernel to save space, and DEC distributed the OS sources to enable that. The distributed version was written in assembler and had had comments stripped, so it wasn't quite like reading the Lions book, but you could read it if you really wanted to.

jclulow 9y ago

It did.

northwest66 9y ago

Yep you got it. My first actual PCs (I don't count the Apricot PCs haha) were DOS 3.3, and I still remember the transition away from 33MB partitions although it's so long ago I can't remember if that came in with DOS 4.0 (abort abort!) or 5. I thought I was so cool having a PC with drives A B C D E F G H I.

u801e 9y ago
I had a 486 PC with a 100 MB hard drive running Dos 5.x (can't recall the minor version). The hard drive was definitely a single partition.
FranOntanaya 9y ago
Oh man, rich kids had a D: drive. The rest of us had to make do with A: and C:

skookumchuck 9y ago

It was 6.3 before that. The PDP-10 system :-)

HankB99 9y ago
Didn't that include a ';' and version number too? (Or was that later - RSX-11M on a PDP 11/23)
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  I think that was later.
kbob 9y ago
I don't know about PDP-10s. DEC's PDP-11 operating systems used a character set called RAD-50, short for radix (octal) 50, for filenames and various other purposes. The (decimal) 40 characters were A-Z, 0-9, and four punctuation characters -- I don't remember which. Three characters could be stored in a 16 bit word, so a 6.3 filename required 3 words or 6 bytes. The '.' separator was not stored, of course. The implementers of CP/M or one of those early PC OSes copied the idea but not the encoding and picked 8.3 as a slightly more usable size. Floppy drives were relatively capacious (!) so bigger filenames were reasonable. The only reason I know this PDP-11 trivia is that end users could recompile the RT-11 kernel to save space, and DEC distributed the OS sources to enable that. The distributed version was written in assembler and had had comments stripped, so it wasn't quite like reading the Lions book, but you could read it if you really wanted to.