NAB kept me totally away from all the interesting online discussions last week. It’s too late to respond to @JoinToigo’s tweet (we’d call this Figs after Easter in Dutch), but I thought I’d share my thoughts in a bit more than 140 characters.
The short answer is no … but a better answer is very much *yes*.
The first file systems were not designed with the thought of petabytes of data. I don’t know what the exact projections were back then, but gigabytes must have sounded pretty sci-fi. Bytes and kilobytes were a lot more common. We didn’t think that we’d soon all be creating tens if not hundreds of multi-megabyte files per day.
File systems have of course evolved a lot and some have become so popular you could actually say they have a fan base (I’d need to do research on ZFS fan clubs). It is clear that the file system has played a very important role in the evolution of the computer industry. In my list of features that helped to make computers a commodity, the file system would probably be in the top three (with the windows-style GUI and the mouse). The file system enables the use of directories, which have been the most important tool to keep our data organized.

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