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The "loop and a half"

Gregory Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Oct 9 01:15:14 EDT 2017 
Grant Edwards wrote:
> Which took it from RSX-11.  Or probably more specifically from
> FILES-11.  I woldn't be surprised if the enineers at DEC got it from
> somewhere else before that.

Quite possibly it goes back to the very earliest DEC OS
that had files, whatever that was.

The reason for it was that the file system only kept track
of file sizes in blocks, not bytes, so some way was needed
to mark the end of a text file part way through a block.

-- 
Greg
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