While reading Brent's description of how he programmed in the 90s using UserLand Frontier I immediately thought of NewtonScript. Apple had much innovation in Newton that got overlooked and how apps were developed and ran on the operating system is one. Newton OS even had a database based file system that optimized sharing across applications to prevent redundancy. I think the Newton files system was not only needed due to the constraints of limited physical storage but also to enable fast and easy application development like Brent describes.#

I think that what Brent describes in his post about Frontier's database for persistent storage is why Dave always emphasizes the need for a common storage platform on the Internet. I've seen Dave struggle through this over the years from using Dropbox and then AWS. Problem seems that we continue to be stuck on the original file structure developed in the CP/M and Unix days with very little innovation ever since. Microsoft seemed to try with WinFS but that never came to fruition and it seems that the industry just gave up.#