On Oct 2, 12:25pm, Bob Brown wrote:
>
> One of the first things I noticed about the directory when we started messin'
> around with Spectrum machines (1988) was that the account, group, user, and
> password names had been expanded to 16 characters.  That is to say, they were
> stored in the directory in spaces that had *room* for 16 characters, not that
16
> were actually allowed.  This led me to believe, at the time, that someday
these
> and file names would be no longer restricted to 8 characters.  D'ya suppose
that
> may have been a plan at one time?
>
>-- End of excerpt from Bob Brown


Not all character sets can be held in a single byte. The declarations were made
this way to hold more generalized character set information with 16-bit
characters. This encoding was to have been useful with internationalization
efforts, but apparently these standards never took off.

Craig

--
Craig Fairchild

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