I think having a plain byte stream is actually better, in a worse is better sort of scenario. A plain byte stream can be easily aligned to work with any future

I think having a plain byte stream is actually better, in a worse is better sort of scenario. A plain byte stream can be easily aligned to work with any future or past encoding fashion. Consider the situation if them that designed unix had not been so aggressively minimal. We would probably be complaining how streams had to be ASN1 encoded and how much a pain it is to define the schema for what should be a simple ad-hoc data transfer. As it stands, you can put whatever object format you want on top of the stream. I think it is the same with the files. I am sort of pleased we are not stuck with some obsolete no longer relevant, screwball structured format from the 70's that all our file have to conform to. instead our file are a simple range of bytes and we can impose whatever structure on them that we want.