Hierarchical file systems were great when you had a limited number of files that you personally had to deal with. The desktop metaphor was great when your hard

Hierarchical file systems were great when you had a limited number of files that you personally had to deal with. The desktop metaphor was great when your hard drive was 4 megs. When its 500 gigs, its just plain broken. The Be File System had both a hfs part plus the far more interesting queryable database part where the user or an application could attach arbitrary data to fs entries. so you could have contacts stored in the fs that were searchable, email 'folders' that you could interact with via the OS and far far more. Alas, that more or less died with with Be although every now and then something else pops up but doesn't get any traction. Another interesting idea was lifestreams which represented all your data as a series of versioned documents stretching back through time. you could search by creation or modification date or search based on content. See: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html Hopefully sooner rather than later, we can ditch the hfs altogether or at least hide it and keep for backwards compatibility.