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>When the Mac was being developed in the early 1980s, the majority of file systems were crude and simple I get that this is a Mac-focused site, but isn't start

>When the Mac was being developed in the early 1980s, the majority of file systems were crude and simple I get that this is a Mac-focused site, but isn't starting at the personal computer era missing out a big chunk of history? My understanding was that in the early days of mainframes and then minicomputers, records/files consisting of multiple fields, in a system-standard structure, was the norm, and that Unix was somewhat radical in pushing for the minimalist alternative that "a file is just a bag of bytes [in a hierarchical namespace]". I seem to recall this being discussed in the Unix Haters Handbook, in fact. So while the xattr model may not exactly match the "old way", conceptually it was something of a return to form rather than a wholly novel idea

somat 3y ago
A lot of the reason that people liked unix was not that it was "better" than it's minicomputer operating system peers but that it embraced simple and holistic interfaces. it is easy to learn and fun to use. It is a hackers os. But robust... Not exactly. My favorite quote which describes the unix viewpoint perfectly is. "We went to lunch afterward, and I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic(), and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'" https://multicians.org/unix.html https://multicians.org/unix.html footnote: Really the real reason unix was popular was that it was available. AT&T was banned from the operating system business. so it was very easy to get a copy(with source). Many university computer departments did just this. and all those newfangled CS students started hacking on and graduated familiar with the system and brought it to industry with them.

somat 3y ago

A lot of the reason that people liked unix was not that it was "better" than it's minicomputer operating system peers but that it embraced simple and holistic interfaces. it is easy to learn and fun to use. It is a hackers os. But robust... Not exactly. My favorite quote which describes the unix viewpoint perfectly is. "We went to lunch afterward, and I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic(), and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'" https://multicians.org/unix.html https://multicians.org/unix.html footnote: Really the real reason unix was popular was that it was available. AT&T was banned from the operating system business. so it was very easy to get a copy(with source). Many university computer departments did just this. and all those newfangled CS students started hacking on and graduated familiar with the system and brought it to industry with them.