WinFS prehistory...

WinFS prehistory...

Posted Nov 6, 2003 21:14 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599)
In reply to: WinFS history... by Cato
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.

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

---

(Log in to post comments)