[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: more QName madness
Tim Bray scripsit: > Tim Bray {decvax!microsoft!, ihnp4!alberta!} ubc-vision!mprvaxa!tbray To unpack this for non-oldtimers, it meant that you had to know a route to any of the machines mentioned. For me, for example, ihnp4 was marob!nyhub!ihnp4, if I remember correctly. So from my viewpoint Tim's email address was marob!nyhub!ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!mprvaxa!tbray, where each name was (in principle) meaningful only to the host that preceded it in hop-by-hop mail routing. The inconvenience of this system was substantial. The original 1969 Unix filesystem was even more "local" and inconvenient. No pathnames either relative or absolute existed (/ was not special) and the directories formed a general graph rather than a tree, with arbitrarily named edges. The only distinguished node was one's home directory, and only because that's where logging in put you. Everyone had to have a link (conventionally named "bin") to the main binary directory in order to run programs, as well as links to "lib" and other useful places, and "chdir" was a dangerous act: if the directory structure was poorly set up, it might be impossible to navigate back to where you came from if no sequence of named links could reach that point. By 1973, we had the now-familiar absolute and relative pathnames, the root directory came into existence, as did the "." and ".." conventions. It is still possible to insert a single file into multiple directories with distinct names. -- John Cowan <jcowan@r...> http://www.reutershealth.com http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Yakka foob mog. Grug pubbawup zink wattoom gazork. Chumble spuzz. -- Calvin, giving Newton's First Law "in his own words"
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