WinFS history... [LWN.net]

WinFS history...

Posted Nov 6, 2003 15:52 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643)
Parent article: The future of the Linux filesystem

WinFS used to be called OFS (Object File System) and was part of the Cairo project, a Windows NT successor announced in 1992 (yes, that long ago) but never shipped. See http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/story/0,10801,69882,00.html and http://news.com.com/2009-1017-857509.html for some background.

I suspect the issues with delivering an OFS/WinFS model are organisational as much as technical - you have to get different product groups (Word, Outlook, etc) or projects (OpenOffice, AbiWord) etc to agree on a common data definition for similar objects. This is reminiscent of what enterprises tried to do a long time ago in defining enterprise-wide data models - it usually turned into a bureaucratic mess, and people ended up going for a suite of products such as SAP, Oracle Applications, etc.

This means that Microsoft may have a chance of doing this for its own Office apps, but others will have to follow its lead quite closely. The Linux suites could also do something similar but it might take quite a bit of cooperation to get diverse applications to agree.

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WinFS prehistory...

Posted Nov 6, 2003 21:14 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

WinFS used to be called OFS (Object File System) and was part of the Cairo project, a Windows NT successor announced in 1992 (yes, that long ago) but never shipped.

Those who remember Dave Cutler's involvement with NT will not be surprised to hear that VMS had database-backed filesystems at least 15 years ago and probably closer to 20 or more. In fact, Unix-like unstructured byte streams ("Stream-LF" format) were almost unheard of in VMS and had all sorts of interoperability problems with the more common record-oriented (IBM-like) files. The actual database-like formats were almost as rare, and I never worked with them myself, but I read about them (more than I ever wanted to) in the Big Orange Wall and its successor.

Greg