>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?

Yep, did lot of FoxBase work on Xenix. We had one customer each running SBT accounting software with 25 terminals, on a 486 with 16MB of ram. Sounds crazy nowadays, but their system literally flew.