[Sussex] Improving on UNIX

[Andrew Guard]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Geoff Teale [mailto:Geoff.Teale at claybrook.co.uk]
> Sent: 14 March 2003 08:49
> To: Sussex (E-mail)
> Subject: [Sussex] Improving on UNIX

> The first bemoaned the death of BeOS - now here I have to 
> agree - like UNIX,
> the foundation of BeOS was the filesystem and the 
> transparancy of the system
> through a filesystem interface.  BeFS and the interface to it 
> (Tracker) were
> the UNIX filesystem evolved to a near perfect state.  BeFS was (is) a
> 64-bit, fully journaled filesystem with dynamic attribute 
> support - it was
> way ahead of the game in it's day and has, to my knowledge, 
> not been matched
> for useability yet.  The important thing was that it was 
> designed to perform
> like a database - dynamic attribute support meant you could 
> store as much
> meta-data around a file as you liked and then you could run 
> queries against
> the filesystem.  All of this functionality was made availble 
> through the
> Tracker (the BeOS filesystem browser / desktop).  The best 
> thing was that
> with a little imagination you could build whole applications 
> in Tracker -
> the default BeOS mailing system used a Mail Daemon to fetch 
> and send into
> folder - attributes of each file (eMail) where displayed and functions
> (open, reply, forward) as context sensitive menus.  The 
> Address book was
> just another directory, each entry was a zero-length file 
> with a number of
> attributes, just as with E-mails the files were identified as 
> Contacts by
> their mime-type and handled in the way the system had 
> specified for Contact
> files.  

The first thing you have to understand about BeOS file system is that it's
not an file system but an data base.  There are some massive advantages and
it is why Microsoft is doing a lot R&D work in this area so expect lot
patents on this issue very soon.  The are some serious problems as well but
user dosn't know about them unless understand the issues involved.