Star From BFS to ZFS: Past, Present, and Future of File Systems
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 17th Mar 2008 07:36 UTC
General Development "Computer platform advocacy can bubble up in the strangest places. In a recent interview at a conference in Australia, Linux creator Linus Torvalds got the Macintosh community in an uproar when he described Mac OS X's file system as 'complete and utter crap, which is scary'. What did he mean? What is a 'file system' anyway, and why would we care why one is better than another? At first glance, it might seem that file systems are boring technical widgetry that would never impact our lives directly, but in fact, the humble file system has a huge influence on how we use and interact with computers."
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unclefester
Member since:
2007-01-13

Just imagine if Gary Kidell had been home when the IBM guys came a callin'. Bill Borg would be working at Radio Shack and the world would be a very different place.

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hobgoblin Member since:
2005-07-06

not really likely as that NDA would still be on the table, and im not sure if kidell was the kind of guy to accept it.

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jabbotts Member since:
2007-09-06

If I remember correctly, the Gates family was into law; my fear is that Bill would have followed the family business and gone into law and possibly politics based on his drive for kingship.

There are days I'm glad that people with that kind of charisma and mind for strategy went into the areas they did; Elvis in music, Bill in business...

It would be interesting to see how it would have turned out. Maybe some other company would have broken the computer from IBM's monopoly or maybe we'd still be living in a 90% IBM world instead of a 90% Microsoft world.

Thankfully, the way it did turn out left us with alternatives and choice though it still get's one labelled a freak for thinking outside the Window.. er.. box.

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bousozoku Member since:
2006-01-23

Just imagine if Gary Kidell had been home when the IBM guys came a callin'. Bill Borg would be working at Radio Shack and the world would be a very different place.


It's obvious that Gary Kildall wasn't too interested. He knew that IBM was visiting to discuss things and he wanted to fly his plane that day.

If Tim Paterson hadn't cloned CP/M, except for user spaces, Microsoft wouldn't have had anything to buy. Months later, CP/M-86 would have probably been in the works and IBM would have had to delay the launch on their PC. Maybe, they could have borrowed the DisplayWriter operating system instead.

The author seemed to miss a few details like CP/M's user spaces, the fact that the adverts for Tim Paterson's operating system were selling 86-DOS, not QDOS.

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