UNIX and the RWW

Some very interesting comments from Ken Thompson:

Probably the glaring error in Unix was that it underevaluated the concept
of remoteness. The open-close-read-write interface should have been
encapsulated together as something for remoteness; something that brought a
group of interfaces together as a single thing—a remote file system as
opposed to a local file system.

Unix lacked that concept; there was just one group of *open-close-read-write
interfaces*. It was a glaring omission and was the reason that some of the
awful things came into Unix like ptrace and some of the system calls. Every
time I looked at later versions of Unix there were 15 new system calls,
which tells you something's wrong. I just didn't see it at the time.

http://genius.cat-v.org/ken-thompson/interviews/unix-and-beyond

This sort of aligns with comment from timbl previously that a goal of the
RWW is to 'webize' the UNIX file system.