fot?

[Shreevatsa R]

I imagine that many systems at the time had comparable restrictions on
filenames (thus the original idea document for TEX [sic] being in a
file called TEXDR.AFT rather than say TEX.DRAFT).
There's a funny remark related to extensions at the start of one of
Knuth's TeX internals videos in 1982, suggesting that extensions were
already becoming an issue as three-letter names were being "taken".
The background (from the start of the video) is that he had just
announced the extension .log for the transcript (log) file written out
by TeX, and someone objected. You can watch the response yourself
(1:00 to 1:35 in Session 11
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnGcMILNhRI&list=PLABJEFgj0PWWQCiXDJ6UmR8BWQ6YcyVHv&t=60>);
sorry for wasting 35 seconds of your
time if you don't find it as funny as I do. :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnGcMILNhRI&list=PLABJEFgj0PWWQCiXDJ6UmR8BWQ6YcyVHv&t=60


On Fri, 11 Dec 2020 at 09:31, Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at hellenic-institute.uk>
wrote:

> barbara beeton wrote:
>
>
> A 3-letter file extension has nothing to do with DOS, which didn't even
> exist when TeX was being developed.  It's a limit of the SAIL operating
> system for the DECSystem 10, on which TeX and MF were developed.  The
> limit for file names was 6.3.  Traces of this can still be seen in the
> names of the Computer Modern fonts, several of which would be more
> easily understood with a few more letters in their names.
>
>
> Well, Barbara is never wrong, by definition, but CP/M, which pre-dates
> both MS/DOS and TeX, (CP/M having been born in 1974) also used an 8.3
> filen-aming convention :
>
> [CP/M <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M>] File names were specified as
> a string of up to eight characters, followed by a period, followed by a
> file name extension of up to three characters ("8.3" filename format
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.3_filename>). The extension usually
> identified the type of the file. For example, .COM indicated an
> executable program file, and .TXT indicated a file containing ASCII
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII> text.
>
>
> *Philip Taylor*
>
>
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