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
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