The fact that file systems force us to organize data a into a set of named files in a fairly rigid hierarchy has been lamented since the 1970s by Ted Nelson (th

The fact that file systems force us to organize data a into a set of named files in a fairly rigid hierarchy has been lamented since the 1970s by Ted Nelson (the man who, among other things, coined the term "hypertext") and others. However, it goes even further back than that with the critique of library indexing systems by Vannevar Bush in his seminal 1945 article As We May Think [1] that described the "Memex" as an alternative: a system that to today's eyes might look something like a PDF viewer with chained bidirectional links (think '90s web rings, only for book and magazine pages), which were called "trails". There have been attempts to remedy those problems by both individuals like Nelson [2] and corporations like Be, Inc. [3] and Microsoft (which may or may not be related to the fact that Nelson's book Computer Lib / Dream Machines was very influential at early Microsoft and Microsoft Press even republished it). It truly is lamentable that Microsoft didn't bring one into the mainstream with WinFS [4]. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... [2] http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6262736 http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6262736, http://www.xanadu.com/ http://www.xanadu.com/ [3] http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf, Chapter 5 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS