Even back then the unix abstractions were breaking down. The problem with lseek is pretty simple: how do you know if a file size is bigger than your int? You c

Even back then the unix abstractions were breaking down. The problem with lseek is pretty simple: how do you know if a file size is bigger than your int? You can do a stat, but that means stat should return a long, but if all you have are ints then what do you do? Make a signed negative value an offset off of the end of an int? These little problems exist everywhere in the bowels of stuff, and they're sort of fun design problems to think about. And the problem is that these were small machines, where everything counts. There was no point wasting some bytes and cycles with typeof metadata.