From: David Barr (barr@visi.com)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 15:41:21 CDT
> I'm not so sure this is accurate. I don't remember what this
> package did,
> but in general you had a choice of storing text in something
> like F80
> format - which would add spaces to any line shorter than 80,
> and truncate
> any line longer than that, and used no end-of-line marker -
> or use some
> variant of Vsomething or so, which used a byte count for
> every line, and
> thus most certainly *could* handle trailing spaces, exept
> just about no
> text handling software cared to handle it that way.
>
> F80 was by far more popular.
Hm. That's not my recollection. The breakage resulting from F80 was
considered to be extremely bad, and variable-length was the norm. It was
extremely easy to have broken articles with F80. With crossposts to three
or four newsgroups and you likely exceeded 80 characters in the Newsgroups:
line.
Most important was the high price of disk space. I seem to remember very
early NETNEWS on PSUVM running with F80, but once they switched to
variable-length they got disk space savings of something like 30-50%.
Mainframe DASD space was *not* cheap, and admins used every trick to save
space, especially with the rapid growth of Usenet in those days.
As far as text handling software not supporting variable length record files
and only supporting V files, I've never heard of this as being a problem. I
know variable-length record files were not supported by many older
applications (like compilers) but XEDIT (the editor) and REXX (the language)
upon which PSU NETNEWS was built supported them just fine.
--Dave