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by Lammy 1218 days ago
TIL PDP-11 UNIX had an eight-character file/directory name limit https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/23917/ori...
2 comments

PDP-11 running RSTS/E had 6.3 filenames, and iirc no sub-directories (each user account (grouped by project) was a single directory). Remembering what “EDS023.DAT” was for could be a headache on large projects.
in 6th edition it was already 14

https://github.com/memnoth/unix-v6/blob/master/sys/ken/nami....

https://github.com/memnoth/unix-v6/blob/master/sys/param.h#L...

i guess this 'edition zero' is from 01971, and 6th edition is 01975

To be pedantic, V0 actually refers to the PDP-7 UNIX released in 1969.

1971 saw the port to the PDP-11/20, which was released as UNIX-11 and soon after, V1 UNIX.

The edition numbers refer to the manual pages more than the software, which in the early days was under continual development running on approximately one machine. It wasn’t released in 1971.
or 01969, though it did exist