One of the more interesting parts of Unix is that there was not a system level way to have records. This was especially wierd given other systems in use at the

One of the more interesting parts of Unix is that there was not a system level way to have records. This was especially wierd given other systems in use at the time spent a lot of time dealing with this exact issue. Just the other day there was a discussion here on HN about file system APIs, and many of the comments were about this peculiarity of Unix: why isn't there one true way to store stuff that is smaller than a file? The answer is probably, well, different uses of data require different things smaller than a file. There isn't really one true way at that point. Also, storage media changes a lot over time. Coming to Unix from another (larger than a PC) OS was strange because it felt so stripped-down, yet capable, largely because of the extreme power the shell gave you to concatenate functionality. I've never read this particular document, an it does really explain this capability well.