4 Dec
2024
4 Dec
'24
9:02 p.m.
I would add one more important impact: making data a first class component
of the computing environment.
Related to that is getting rid of "file types". I remember at a "lessons
of
Unix" panel at a Usenix, that someone from the Labs gave an example of a
situation where the operating system treated a file as more than just a set
of bytes (think IBM, VMS, etc). Read a source file (required them to do a
bunch of file-conversion operations), write an output, perhaps changing a
variable name from 'foo' to 'bar', and then compiling the output,
which
also required a bunch of file-conversion operations.