[TUHS] VFS prior to 1984

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:

> For my taste, the various Unix file system switches that I've seen are too
> firmly tied to the idea of blocks and disks and all that, making them less
> flexible than they should have been. That's why the Plan 9 version is about
> names and byte streams, to make it as general as possible.
>
> That's one of the reasons the possibilities of the file system approach to
> data has not reached its potential in Unix.
>
> -rob

Well, it's a progression, isn't it?  As ideas are tried out, they are
used and then refined, and used and refined further. Multics did that
for its predecessors,  Unix did that for Multics, and Plan 9 did that
for Unix.  The key difference in Unix and Plan 9 from others being
the continual goal towards refinement through simplification.

Arnold