5 ms·

CP/M didn't have sub-directories, though it did have 16 "user areas" on a disk.

II2II 4y ago
MS-DOS did not have directories at first either. It was a feature in version 2.0, when hard drive support was added. Directories seem to have been a foreign concept among early home computer operating systems and I suspect its adoption was driven by the adoption of hard drives. For example, the Apple II did not gain directory support until ProDOS was introduced and the Macintosh only gained folders with the introduction of HFS. I don't recall directories existing for the Commodore 64 either.
- jasomill 4y ago
  Technically, the original Macintosh filesystem supported folders as "an illusion maintained by the system software"[1] in spite of its flat directory structure. [1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/mac/Files/Files-85.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Directories just weren’t worth it on discs that stored less than 200k. You organized stuff by putting the floppies in the right place in their storage boxes.
aidos 4y ago
Oooo, question for those that might know a little more about this. I had an Amstrad (CPC6128 running CP/M) and I found that if I did cat to list disk contents without a disk in the drive enough times in a row it would eventually list out really random contents. Anyone know what might have been going on.
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
  CAT would have been AMSDOS, not CP/M (it was DIR in CP/M). Not sure what was happening in that case though - it sounds like a bug, but not one I ever recall encountering!
  - aidos 4y ago
    Oh interesting. I swear it was cp/m; cat I’m more hazy on (though I feel like I didn’t use dir until ibm dos). I had to really hammer on the command, and it would actually be trying to read either the hardware. I wonder if it was actually a physical issue that triggered it.
    - atq2119 4y ago
      Sounds like whatever check that was used to determine whether a floppy was present or not had some small probability of giving a false positive. Maybe because without a floppy, the head would read random data that could pass some integrity check by chance.

MS-DOS did not have directories at first either. It was a feature in version 2.0, when hard drive support was added. Directories seem to have been a foreign concept among early home computer operating systems and I suspect its adoption was driven by the adoption of hard drives. For example, the Apple II did not gain directory support until ProDOS was introduced and the Macintosh only gained folders with the introduction of HFS. I don't recall directories existing for the Commodore 64 either.

jasomill 4y ago
Technically, the original Macintosh filesystem supported folders as "an illusion maintained by the system software"[1] in spite of its flat directory structure. [1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/mac/Files/Files-85.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...
egypturnash 4y ago
Directories just weren’t worth it on discs that stored less than 200k. You organized stuff by putting the floppies in the right place in their storage boxes.

aidos 4y ago

Oooo, question for those that might know a little more about this. I had an Amstrad (CPC6128 running CP/M) and I found that if I did cat to list disk contents without a disk in the drive enough times in a row it would eventually list out really random contents. Anyone know what might have been going on.

Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
CAT would have been AMSDOS, not CP/M (it was DIR in CP/M). Not sure what was happening in that case though - it sounds like a bug, but not one I ever recall encountering!
- aidos 4y ago
  Oh interesting. I swear it was cp/m; cat I’m more hazy on (though I feel like I didn’t use dir until ibm dos). I had to really hammer on the command, and it would actually be trying to read either the hardware. I wonder if it was actually a physical issue that triggered it.
  - atq2119 4y ago
    Sounds like whatever check that was used to determine whether a floppy was present or not had some small probability of giving a false positive. Maybe because without a floppy, the head would read random data that could pass some integrity check by chance.