*BSD News Article 83167


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From: j@ida.interface-business.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: On the Naming of UNIX Things
Date: 18 Nov 1996 16:36:41 GMT
Organization: interface business GmbH, Dresden
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  <E0L92J.4tM@world.std.com> <kbibb.847601696@shellx>
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mark@troma.rv.tis.com (Mark Sienkiewicz) wrote:

> You were also dealing with a mindset at the time that names had to
> be short.  There were lots of things like the 6 character variable
> names in FORTRAN, the 2 and 3 character mnemonics for machine
> instructions, etc etc that made people tend to shorten names
> automatically.  DEC even had a character set encoding that 
> let you squeeze 3 characters into 2 bytes (thus the 3 characters
> extension in file names).

Radix-50, meaning you could encode octal 50 == decimal 40 different
characters in one digit: 26 letters, 10 decimal digits, dollar, dot,
underscore and space, IIRC.  I think two thirds of the RSX-11 names
were encoded R50...  That's also why RSX-11 command names were three
letters.

-- 
J"org Wunsch					       Unix support engineer
joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de       http://www.interface-business.de/~j