I think those things are largely orthogonal, though. Opening a file can be simple, while not everything having to be a file. So, having the concept of files at

I think those things are largely orthogonal, though. Opening a file can be simple, while not everything having to be a file. So, having the concept of files at all (and simple to open ones, to boot) is of course much better than MVS datasets, which barely abstracted the storage hardware at all for you. But on the other end of this, that does not mean everything has to be a file, as UNIX popularized. To be clear, I am never defending MVS. We've come a long way from that, and that's good. I may however want to defend AS/400, which is far away from UNIX in the other direction, and so in a lot of ways the polar opposite of MVS. However, I haven't actually worked with it enough to know whether it's awesome seeming concepts actually hold up in real life. (Though I've at least frequently heard how incredibly rock solid and dependable AS/400s are.)