🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4bcr6a$pja@ixnews8.ix.netcom.com> mschmit@ix.netcom.com(Mike Schmit) writes:
>>>What came first. The DOS backslash or the Unix forward slash. I was
>>>under the impression that it was the Unix forward slash that was first.
>>
>>What a bizarre concept.  Unix came first by over a decade, and wasn't
>>the first to use '/' even then, it was based on Multics, which was, if
>>I recall correctly, the first major OS with hierarchical directories
>>and which used the slash to create pathnames for them back in the
>>70's, [...]
>
>I think Multics was in the late 60's. Also, the Dartmouth time-sharing
>system (DTSS) the inventors of BASIC and the first working time sharing
>system, also had hierarchical directories, at least as early as 1968.

It's possible (I think) that the DTSS got the idea from some of the
Multics folk.

But, bizarrely, ordinary users were discouraged from using
directories.  Indeed, the standard DTSS command interpreter 
provided no way to create them.  There was another program,
filemove, that did; but ordinary users didn't have permission
to use it.  However, DTSS Lisp could also create directories,
and some people took advantage of that ...

(Of course, someone writing in assembler could create directories,
though it's possible that the assembler and the machine-code debugger
were restricted in the same way as filemove.)

-- jd