No idea, but VMS have something like that, and probably also other mini computers of the era.
I'm only 40 so I'm to young to know :-)
I think that Unix' "everything is a stream" concept won because it's simple and powerful, but it's a good example of the failure of our educational systems that only old geezers have a clue that there are alternatives.
I feel like 99 % of the things I do at work, some guy at IBM should have made a generic solution for in 1979. Actually someone probably did.
Maybe. You can query on BFS to match meta data entries. But for me it's more important that file systems be transactional. So instead of doing a stupid write-to-tmp-file and then move-into-place-on-same-physical-volume-hoping-it's-atomic dance you could just say open('filename').then_write(buf).then_commit() or whatever and it would do the work as a transaction; or fail. But you wouldn't end up with corrupt files with half written chunks.
