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50 Years in Filesystems: 1984


Kris Köhntopp's blog (Fedi: @isotoppinfosec.exchange)

A more concise, but also more academic discussion can be found in the classic 1984 paper A Fast File System for UNIX, which lists Marshall McKusick, Bill Joy (then at Sun), Samuel Leffler (then at LucasFilm) and Robert Fabry as authors. Katz also mentions that during that time Stonebraker was around, working on Ingres (a Postgres predecessor), and refers to his demands for low-commit latency as driving the attempts on improving disk bandwidth with FFS and, later, RAID. All of these optimizations became irrelevant relatively quickly the moment harddrives were sold with integrated controllers, started to lie about their CHS geometry and ultimately as linear block addresses (LBA) took over.

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