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From: Lew Pitcher <lew.pitcher@digitalfreehold.ca>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Rationale for aligning data on even bytes in a Unix shell file?
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2025 23:49:03 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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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"