Or: The Filesystem is not the Disk Or: Trees are the Roots of the Underground --- Don't be misled by marketing speak, as non-technical management and naive developers often are. They will tell you all data belongs in a database, a distributed object store, or an inscrutible optimized binary format. Instead: Learn to love the filesystem, and default to [[Standardize on Plain Text|plain text]]. It was an experiment in filesystems that gave us Unix. ![[the-filesystem-pdp7-unix-as-an-experiment-in-filesystems-from-gunkies-dot-org.png]] Ken and Dennis later described the filesystem's place in the system like this. ![[the-filesystem-most-important-role-of-unix.png]] When the greats describe what they're interested in, they will say optimizing [pathname lookup](https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?si=bVy8k8WN6xTUFyur&t=1327). (22:07 - 23:36 in [[Linus Torvalds - Aalto Talk]]) To quote our Abraham, filesystems are the [[Ken - Ultimate Cool|Ultimate Cool]].