A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
October 5th, 2026
Welcome to the 97th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about File Systems. In this edition, Graham wonders whether the idea of a hierarchical file system makes sense at all in 2026; Adrian goes back in time to find the origin of the "everything is a file" moniker; in our Vidéothèque section, Adrian reviews a documentary about the Unix file system on the AT&T Tech Channel; and in the Library section, Graham reviews the Apple Computer, Inc. developer manual explaining the file system in the 1990s.
by Graham Lee
The hierarchical file system—a directed graph database that is not quite an adirected tree—in which every node is either a container of other nodes that has no content itself (a folder, or directory, or drawer for those lucky enough to work with Amiga Workbench) or a leaf node that has content but no other nodes (a file). To effectively use one of those, you need random-access storage; if you are using a tape you do not bother, you have a single table of contents at the front with offsets to the starts of the various files. If you use punchcards then your filing system is literally the cabinets full of drawers and folders you keep the cards in.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski
In page 227 of the wonderful book "The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop, covered in a previous issue, telling the story of the early development of computers, we can learn that Fernando Corbató and his team were busy in 1965 adding a new feature to CTSS, the first interactive and multi-user operating system for the IBM 7094 computer. That feature was, you guessed it, a file system.
There is a sense of vertigo when one watches the 1982 documentary "The UNIX Operating System", preserved on YouTube by the AT&T Archives channel. For anyone interested in the archaeology of our craft, it acts as a portal into an era where computer science was still wearing diapers. We see Brian Kernighan typing thoughtfully on a terminal; we see Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the quiet architects of our modern digital reality, speaking with the understated confidence of craftsmen who had just discovered fire.
Good technical documentation does not need to provide drama, though some people manage to introduce that anyway—consider the second edition of Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer, which builds up a case, like a consulting detective in a crime fiction novel, for a programming language based on a structured and consistent model of object-oriented software design. Only at the end does Meyer reveal that this language existed all along, and that it is… well, no spoilers here.
