Re: Rationale for aligning data on even bytes in a Unix shell file?

On Thu, 01 May 2025 00:15:12 +0200, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 30.04.2025 15:41, Scott Lurndal wrote:

Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:

On 30.04.2025 03:53, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:17:50 +0300, Michael S wrote:
>

z/Os is alive and in good shape, but everybody knows that despite
the trademark it is not similar to Unix.

>
Just goes to show the worthlessness of the “Unix” name nowadays.

>
"UNIX" has a meaning that varied historically. But "Unix" is
commonly used as a name for the family of "UNIX-like" systems;
that's very useful since it allows to formulate commonalities
of this OS family.[*]
>
[*] As we've seen in the discussion of Unix file systems with
its basic structure of being built by sequences of octets[**]
and having two distinguished characters '\0' and '/'.
>
[**] BTW; does anyone know how e.g. the [historic] Borroughs

 
  s/Borroughs/Burroughs/
then
  s/Burroughs/Sperry/

 
Oh, sorry, I actually made even a more serious mistake beyond a typo;
 
   s/Borroughs/Honeywell 6000/
 
But the question was not so much about the concrete system label but
the principle question what happens if a system's character width is
defined as 9 bit, the underlying hardware (like hard disks) probably
8 bit,

A quick read through the Wikipedia article on the Honeywell 6000 and
another read through the documentation on the (related) DDS190 disk
storage unit (see https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1939073/Honeywell-6000-Series.html?page=8#manual)
indicates that the hard disks used 6-bit characters. That would mean
that, on disk, you could store a Honeywell 6000 36-bit word as 6 6bit
characters (or 2 9bit program characters in 3 6bit storage characters).
 

and a Unix OS file-system in between.
 
Janis
 

[...]

--
Lew Pitcher
"In Skills We Trust"