[TUHS] VFS prior to 1984

[Larry McVoy]

I like to claim credit for creating the ChangeSet concept, the grouping
of a set of deltas across a number of files.  But I wasn't the first.
Back when dejanews was a thing and you could search usenet posts in a
date range, if you searched before I started talking about ChangeSets,
you could find 6, count 'em, 6 hits.  There was a really obscure system
called Aide De Camp, that had a similar concept.

But if you searched after I started talking about them you would see
millions of hits.

So I didn't invent the concept but I sure as heck made the world 
understand the concept.

I suspect Sun could be in a similar position.  The VFS concept is
pretty sweet so there might have been someone before Sun.  I'll
long odds that if there was, it didn't gain traction until Sun
did it.

If there is nothing that predates it, then the inspiration was
almost certainly the device driver interface.  One interface,
many devices.  VFS is the same.

On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 11:09:57AM +0200, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> When googling for File System Switch or Virtual File System most sources mention Sun NFS and SysVr3 as the earliest implementations. Some sources mention 8th Edition.
> 
> I did a (short) search  on FSS/VFS in earlier, non-Unix OS???s (Tenex, Multics, CTSS, etc.), but none of those seem to have had a comparable concept.
> 
> Does anybody recall prior art (prior to 1984) in this area?
> 
> Paul

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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm