funny characters in filenames - (nf)

[emrath at uiuccsb.UUCP]

#R:mit-eddi:-54600:uiuccsb:14900002:000:695
uiuccsb!emrath    Aug 16 00:03:00 1983

I remember dec's DOS opsys for the pdp-11.
The open system call took 3 words of "rad50" (48 bits) as the file
name. However, all bit patterns except all 0s were valid as far as
the filing system calls were concerned. All 0s meant the directory
entry was free. Sure, U could write your own program to create weird
file names, but there also were system calls used for parsing file
specifiers. All the system programs, and most of the user stuff we
wrote, used the same parsing routine, so everybody stayed happy, most
of the time. The restrictions on file names were imposed by essentially
a library routine (though this happened to be part of the "kernel", god
forbid). Sounds all too familiar.