The Nightmare of Files and Directories

Sebastian sent me the link to the video "Computers for Cynics 1 - The Nightmare of Files and Directories" by Ted Nelson, which is a very important person in the history of computing.

Just like me, he is criticizing hierarchical file systems as the dominant way of organizing user data (in contrast to operating system and program files). I do think that my arguments against strict hierarchies do have a broader basis. However, his arguments derived from the history of file systems are absolutely valid and worth the 15 minutes of the video.

Here are my personal notes with a few annotations on that video.

1:50 How it all began
- files = box of punchcards
2:30 meta-data is not part of the lump (file)
- 3:00 meta-data should be represented a lot better
3:20 Random facts about files
- The Backslash in Windows directories was put there by Paul Allen by no particular reason
  - annotation: Wikipedia tells a story with at least some reason
- 3:30 file suffixes (".exe", ".jpg", …): appeared first on Windows and then got to the Macintosh made file names less readable
- 3:50 don't bet on the hope that Unicode will fix the issue with special characters in file names
4:15 story of directories and their hierarchies
- most probably directories started as (normal?) files that contained file names
- 5:20 the very limited number of projects allowed for effective organization within a hierarchy
- 5:50 Multics → Unix; license costs of Bell prevented Unix to become a standard for personal computers
- 6:30 Unix: File names can be any length (technically a lie); directories can be stacked to any depth (technically a lie) → fairly robust within those unseen boundaries
- 7:00 file system incompatibilities because of vendor lock-in
8:38 How does a file system work? Example: NTFS
- 10:05 Efficiency only for a hierarchical file system concept
- 10:20 Unix: "Everything is a file"
10:40 several technical problems
- running out of inodes
  - the disk is full because of inode table is full because of too many small files while still having enough space left for data
- 11:00 running out of space in directory names or directory depth
  - concatenated directory names within the directory table exceeds a boundary
- 11:40 DCIM directory
12:05 all of this is fundamentally broken
- a nightmare for most users
- 12:20 no way of annotating files
- 12:25 disallowed characters like ?
- 13:00 it's dangerous to change the names of files or directories because of broken links from elsewhere (Windows shortcuts)
- 13:20 hard links and soft links: neither of them allow moving of files
  - annotation: not true for all cases; some cases are file but you need technical understanding of the details to handle this as a user
- 13:50 backups become black holes
14:20 starting from scratch is difficult
- 14:25 "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." (Niccolo Machiavelli)