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In (March?) 2007 (correction 2008) myself and two other engineers in front of Bruce Chizen - Adobe's CEO in a small conference room in Bucharest demoed a photo

In (March?) 2007 (correction 2008) myself and two other engineers in front of Bruce Chizen - Adobe's CEO in a small conference room in Bucharest demoed a photo taken with an iPhone automagically showing as a file on a Mac. I implemented the local FUSE talking to Ozzy - Adobe's distributed object store back then, using an equivalent of a Linux inode structure. It worked like a charm and if I remember correctly it took us a few days to build it. It was a success just as much as Adobe's later choices around http://Photoshop.com http://Photoshop.com were a huge failure. A few months later Dropbox launched. That kickstarted about a decade in (actual) research and development led by my team which positioned the Bucharest center as one of the most prolific centers in distributed systems within Adobe and of Adobe within Romania. But I didn't come up with the concept, it was Richard Jones that inspired us with the Gmail drive that used FUSE with gmail attachments back in 2004 when I got my first while still in college https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive. I guess I'm old, but I find it funny to see Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

huntaub 2y ago
The funny thing about storage is that all of the problems are the same! Ultimately, there is no problem that cannot be solved with caching, journaling, write-ahead logging, etc. I think what makes the problem space so interesting is how a million different products can make a million different trade offs with these tools to deliver on their customer needs. File systems are awesome.
- random3 2y ago
  > The funny thing about storage is that all of the problems are the same! they are all the same and they are all more than what would at the surface seem that it's "just files" the whole OS, especially Linux/UNIX is "just files" and if you look deeper at databases you can see how it boils down to the file formats (something that was visible with LevelDB but maybe less so with RocksDB, I guess)
mikeshi42 2y ago
wow gmail drive is a walk down memory lane :) really is amazing how far we've come since then!

huntaub 2y ago

The funny thing about storage is that all of the problems are the same! Ultimately, there is no problem that cannot be solved with caching, journaling, write-ahead logging, etc. I think what makes the problem space so interesting is how a million different products can make a million different trade offs with these tools to deliver on their customer needs. File systems are awesome.

random3 2y ago
> The funny thing about storage is that all of the problems are the same! they are all the same and they are all more than what would at the surface seem that it's "just files" the whole OS, especially Linux/UNIX is "just files" and if you look deeper at databases you can see how it boils down to the file formats (something that was visible with LevelDB but maybe less so with RocksDB, I guess)

mikeshi42 2y ago

wow gmail drive is a walk down memory lane :) really is amazing how far we've come since then!