Bob Brown asked:

> 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?

to which Lee Courtney states:

> At one time ASCII data structures were going to converted to UNICODE
> for localization purposes, hence the need for 16-bytes rather than 8.
> The number of characters would remain the same, but UNICODE encoding
> used 16-bit characters.

In any case, thank goodness for the expansion. Without it, even POSIX
files placed in an MPE group (e.g., /SYS/PUB/posixname) would have
that 8-char limit on their filename (and the example would be invalid).
As it stands, they can have 16 chars. It's only those files NOT placed
directly under an MPE name that can have more.

--Glenn Cole
  Software al dente, Inc.
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