MS-DOS did not have directories at first either. It was a feature in version 2.0, when hard drive support was added.
Directories seem to have been a foreign concept among early home computer operating systems and I suspect its adoption was driven by the adoption of hard drives. For example, the Apple II did not gain directory support until ProDOS was introduced and the Macintosh only gained folders with the introduction of HFS. I don't recall directories existing for the Commodore 64 either.
Directories just weren’t worth it on discs that stored less than 200k. You organized stuff by putting the floppies in the right place in their storage boxes.
Technically, the original Macintosh filesystem supported folders as "an illusion maintained by the system software"[1] in spite of its flat directory structure.
Oooo, question for those that might know a little more about this.
I had an Amstrad (CPC6128 running CP/M) and I found that if I did cat to list disk contents without a disk in the drive enough times in a row it would eventually list out really random contents. Anyone know what might have been going on.
CAT would have been AMSDOS, not CP/M (it was DIR in CP/M). Not sure what was happening in that case though - it sounds like a bug, but not one I ever recall encountering!
Oh interesting. I swear it was cp/m; cat I’m more hazy on (though I feel like I didn’t use dir until ibm dos).
I had to really hammer on the command, and it would actually be trying to read either the hardware. I wonder if it was actually a physical issue that triggered it.
Sounds like whatever check that was used to determine whether a floppy was present or not had some small probability of giving a false positive. Maybe because without a floppy, the head would read random data that could pass some integrity check by chance.
