• PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    18 days ago

    While it is true the filesystem itself is an abstraction, it is a common abstraction used by every contemporary operating system for the past 40+ years, including the ones which hide this aspect from the end-user, excepting highly resource-constrained embedded systems. You could define an operating system as something that does filesystems and be like almost correct. If alternative architectures (like a global key-value store with namespaces, for instance) were in common use, then they would be worth mentioning in a practical “how computers work” course rather than courses for people specializing in computer science.