Hard to believe, but in the early 90s we were still doing that on the SCO Unix Phoenix version! Whenever we wanted to transfer data to disk, we wrote programs that determined how much space was available, what sequence was best to fit the most (unbroken) files on the fewest number of disks, etc. By the way, does anyone remember Xenix?


>>>Didn't the Wangs use the hard sectored disks with the holes so it could find the sectors?
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>>>Funny things that pop into the mind ...
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>>Yes .. I remember the concept of sectors on those disks. Wang Basic didn't have the concept of indexes on the data .. we just told it to go to a certain sector on the disk and read the data. Or we could sequentially read through each sector .. but we certainly couldn't tell it to go find a particular record.
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>That's true. I did my own kind of indexing. I was packing data to get more onto a single disk and knew how many records I was storing per sector for a given table.
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>The worst was that you had to allocate file space up front and if you guessed wrong about how large a file would turn out to be, it was a big hassle. I eventually wrote a configuration program that asked the user what the maximum number of records for each of a number of quantities would be. I created the files based on 1.5 * the number specified.
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>Tamar