Re: Why complicated directory structure in Linux

Lew Pitcher wrote:
Chris F Clark wrote:
mydejamail@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:

I did not slag it, I simply wanted to understand the rationale for
having 3 bin, usr, lib, etc directories. You also forget that Windows
originated in the main as a single user system and a lot of the design
considerations applying to Unix never got to bear on it.
Just some minor corrections.

Just some minor corrections on your minor corrections.

1) DOS is a descendent, at least indirectly, from Unix. The original
DOS was written to be like CP/M which was written to be like Unix.
There are some bizarrenesses, like why they chose the opposite
slash character for directory separators, but in many ways DOS
looks a lot like a quick-and-dirty Unix knock-off.

DOS had other progentiors also. I think the 3 character file
suffixes (extensions) are a "VMSism" in the sense that DEC OSes of
the time tended to use 3 character file extensions rather than
single letter ones.

It appears that you've got your history scrambled quite a bit

First of MSDOS v1.0 was a repackaged QDOS from Seattle Computer
Products

QDOS was a "knock off" of CP/M, written for the 8086

The CP/M command structure and file naming conventions were modeled
after (IIRC) RSTS/E, which was a DEC operating system that predated VMS
(and Unix) by a fair bit.


Well the UNIX Operating System first came out for the PDP/11 around 1970 or
1971 and I started using it a little after that. The kernel was 6 (IIRC)
assembler source files that you ran through _cat_ and piped it into _as_ to
get an a.out that was the executable kernel.

The best date I can find for the RSTS/E was "early 1970s. Of course DEC
_had to_ come out with something to run the PDP/11 with, and that was about
when the PDP//11 series came out. A little earlier, IIRC, but with a
different, more primitive OS whose name I disremember.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 06:40:01 up 20 days, 9:30, 3 users, load average: 4.01, 4.10, 4.05
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Nerd needs help
    ... hat IIRC mal an einen UNIX gearbeitet, dies aber IIRC SCO überlassen. ...
    (de.org.ccc)
  • Re: filesystem reliability
    ... > Multics was also intended for a very different class of hardware than ... > UNIX. ... IIRC, it wasn't until relatively recently that clever ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: error message from compiler "::vfwscanf has not been declared"
    ... I started to program with C in UNIX. ... From the code and commandline below, ... IIRC, you want to save your code as hello.cpp ... But, when I tried to compile it, it could not be done. ...
    (comp.unix.shell)
  • Re: filesystem reliability
    ... > Multics was also intended for a very different class of hardware than ... > UNIX. ... IIRC, it wasn't until relatively recently that clever ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Why complicated directory structure in Linux
    ... You also forget that Windows ... DOS is a descendent, at least indirectly, from Unix. ... DOS was written to be like CP/M which was written to be like Unix. ... the time tended to use 3 character file extensions rather than ...
    (comp.os.linux.setup)