>> Files only on disk? Or on tape too? 
> 
> Obviously tape files were contiguous.  I must be misunderstanding what 
> you're asking.

 From what little I've seen, with punch cards it's a case of "please 
read this bunch of cards". You don't have filenames or anything. 
Presumably on magnetic disk you have a file *system* which describes 
logical files with names and things. I'm asking whether the same holds 
for tape, or whether it's just treated as an endless stream of bytes (or 
records or whatever).

>> OK. But does the system know where the *fields* in a record are? Or 
>> just what size the records are?
> 
> You compiled it into the program. Often when they weren't actually fixed 
> size, they were fixed size anyway and padded (like cards).  Or the size 
> was stored in the header of the file.

Right. So it's a property of the program, not the system.

>> Yeah, I think the term "mainframe" is probably obsolete now. There are 
>> probably more exact ways to describe what type of computer you mean.
> 
> Could be.  There's something clearly between "small" and "large" now.

Minicomputers! :-D

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