History
When IBM and Microsoft were codeveloping OS/2, they realized that File Allocation Tables, FATs, did not offer the features a modern OS would require, and Microsoft began developing the High Performance File System, codenamed Pinball.
Instead of coding it inside the kernel, as FAT was, Microsoft developed a "driver-based" Filesystem API that could allow them and other developers to add new filesystems to the kernel without needing to modify it.
When Microsoft stopped working on OS/2, IBM continued using the IFS interface and Microsoft implemented a similar one in Windows NT.
Read more about this topic: Installable File System
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)