Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
In Windows world those features were within the scope of the ill-fated Longhorn (WinFS) project - maybe they will bubble up again - probably not in my lifetime though.
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IIRC, Longhorn looked at replacing the standard hierarchical file system with one derived from SQL Server.
Back when, I worked on mainframes, and IBM OS/VS1 and OS/MVS "knew" about various file types and handled them differently. (I assume DOS/VSE behaved similarly, but I never worked on it.)
The converse was Unix, where a file was a file was a file. Unix knew about three kinds of files: standard files, directories, and "special" files. Those were actually devices, and the entry in a directory didn't point to a file on disk - it pointed to an entry point in the kernel address space. Opening the file accessed the device. Files could be created, opened, read from, written to, closed, and destroyed. A program was simply a file with the execute bit set in the file's permissions mask. If it wasn't actually an executable program or shell script, you got an error trying to run it.
Longhorn reminded me a bit of MVS, and of Dick Pick's PickOS, which included a relational database manager as an OS component rather than a layered product, and a variant of BASIC as the built in programming language.
I could see the attraction in what Longhorn was looking at doing, but didn't see a way to get there without "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" in migrating from a hierarchical file system.
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Dennis