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I'll say it again: We can now see that FindFirst and FindNext were not bad ideas after all.

Can you explain? I'm (semi) familiar with the heap and definitely hated on first fit and next fit in favor of beat fit. I get that its gonna take significantly less time to find a block to allocate but why does listing files benefit so much from it and not run into a memory usage problem. Unless your splitting the block on allocation but then i would think you still have a peoblem cause you'd have a high degree of external fragmentation.

I typed a lot so i can be better corrected, not because I understand what is going on.

Sure, I can explain. FindFirst and FindNext are API (syscalls) from DOS (maybe CP/M too, I don't know). I can use findfirst to begin listing files on a directory and then make subsequent calls to findnext to get each one of the other files.

At the time people looked down on it mostly because everybody else did it differently and DOS looked like a toy OS compared to more advanced ones.

Of course, my comment is kind of a joke. There many advantages on more advanced ways to list files on a directory. Not having to make one syscall for every file is just one.

Ridiculed for 30 years, but finally vindicated by a directory containing 8 million files. Those fools…

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