The author got a number of things wrong, but the thing that has surprised you is one of the few that xe actually got right. The handle-based API and subdirecto

The author got a number of things wrong, but the thing that has surprised you is one of the few that xe actually got right. The handle-based API and subdirectories, introduced in MS-DOS version 2, were both Unix concepts added to MS-DOS that remained in DOS+Windows and in its successors OS/2 and Windows NT. (This wasn't the only Unix concept to cross to the IBM+Microsoft world. 32-bit OS/2 even changed to keeping system time the same way that Unix did, with a 64-bit count of seconds since the Epoch.) Command pipelines were right there in MS-DOS 2, as well. Peter Norton wrote a chapter about them in his MS-DOS and PC-DOS Users Guide in 1984. Ironically, the thing that you have got wrong, in your turn, is your assertion that "an obsession with unstructured text" is actually true of MacOS and Linux in the first place. Most textual data files in such operating systems are in fact structured into records and fields; many data files (especially on the BSDs with termcap, the account database, and various others being Berkeley DB files) are not text at all; and there has been one particular database (the login database) that has not been text since 1BSD and Research Unix version 7.