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Message: [QUOTE="Dave Thompson, post: 2494695"] On 28 Oct 2006 15:20:20 -0700, "Ancient_Hacker" <grg2@comcast.net> wrote: MULTICS was definitely several years earlier; TOPS-20 was TTBOMR about concurrent with first Unix, and TENEX several years earlier. OS/360 had hierarchically organized _names_, stored centrally in a system catalog not in separate directories, by the mid '60s. And it was more widely used and known/taught than the others combined. But if you mean 'popular' in the sense of used (directly) by large numbers of people, that would indeed be MSDOS; those others ran on systems an ordinary person couldn't afford. But to Walter Roberson downthread, the S/370 et seq system with "logical disk" with 1letter* 8char-filename 8char-filetype is _CMS_ (run under VM) NOT MVS or any other flavor of OS/* now z/OS. (* Technically IIRC 1letter disk and optional 1digit mode, but the latter is rarely needed or used.) And although it's a debatable point of terminology, I would say that any centralized metadata mapping names to storage (regions) is a directory, including CMS, RT-11, and early CP/M or MSDOS; where necessary I would call this a "one-level" or "fixed" directory in contrast to "hierarchical" and/or "user-defined" directories. For a truly nondirectory structure I would point to IBM partitioned data sets (PDS); Unix (originally) "ar" and "tar" archives; and the alltime classic, labelled magtapes. Note not ZIP; it has metadata both distributed AND centralized, and so counts as directoried. - David.Thompson1 at worldnet.att.net [/QUOTE]

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