Re: ancient OS history, ARM is sort of channeling the IBM 360

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> schrieb:

According to Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net>:

Is there?   It's trivially easy to impose a record structure
on a stream of bytes, and all the unix file access APIs allow
direct access to the device without extra buffering if desired,
subject to some alignment constraints.

>
At the time Unix was written, the big advantage of byte stream text was
that there weren't any trailing blanks so you fit a lot more data onto
a disk than you did with 80 or 132 character fixed records.

>
That was one advantage.  Consider, however, that byte streams fit
quite well into the unix pipeline paradigm and that may have been
the driving force behind the non-record-based I/O facilities in
Unix,...

>
Pipelines work equally well with fixed length records.  They were
familar with byte streams from PDP-10, Multics, and other systems
they'd worked with.

Did these systems actually feature byte streams?  Both the PDP-10
and the GE 635 were word-oriented machines with 36 bits, so I
assume it must have been word streams at least.

But a quick search didn't turn up details, so I may be wrong.