Though I’ve been aware of the ReiserFS, I had mentally categorized it as “a high-performance journaling filesystem for Linux.” It was a revelation to discover that, for Reiser, this technology is just a means to an end — namely, turning the filesystem into the kind of object database that can help us model the real-world activities we engage in when we create, store, exchange, and search for information.

Reiser’s paper is imbued by a vision that goes far beyond the nitty-gritty details of inodes and indexes.

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