Erdos Had The Number First

One of the things that made BeOS so freeking cool was the BeOS file system. BFS was, quite frankly, the most advanced file system at the time. It was more like a database than a filesystem, and you could add/manipulate/whatever the file metadata at will. In fact, many applications for BeOS capitilized on the filesystems DB-like properties quite a bit.

For example, document metadata was stored as file attributes. This allowed you to search for a paticular file on your computer using this metadata in a powerful way.

There are a number of problems with implementing a database file system. The book about BFS covers many of these issues but even today there are no real DB based filesystems in broad use.

Enter Google Desktop. It’s funny that the second edition of Managing Gigabytes was relased in 1999.

MG, BFS, and all utilities like them (including Microsoft Indexing Services) are designed to do one thing: Alllow a user to store, manipulate, and find the information they need. GDS succeeds where all of these other fail.

It’s pretty impressive that, yet again, someone from Google has taken tech that was out there, but didn’t really work, and made it no longer out there, but rather it’s Right Here, Now.