The original authors of "UNIX" considered their creation to be fatally flawed, and created a successor OS called "Plan 9", partially to address this specific de

The original authors of "UNIX" considered their creation to be fatally flawed, and created a successor OS called "Plan 9", partially to address this specific deficit, among others like the perceived tacked-on nature of GUIs on *nix. That's a whole rabbit hole to go down, but Plan 9 networking is much more like your hypothetical example [0]. Additionally, things like the framebuffer and devices are also exposed as pure files, whereas on Linux and most unix-like systems such devices are just endpoints for making ioctl() calls. [0] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/ http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/