Comment by grymoire1
3 days ago
Some people think today's file hierarchy is complicated. .That's amusing.
I worked at an R&D center where we had hundreds of UNIX systems orf all types(i.e. Sun, Ultrix, HP, Symbolics, etc.) We also had Sun 2's , 3's and 4's - each with different CPU's/architectures and incompatible binaries. Some Suns had no disks at all. And with hundreds of systems, we literally had a hundred different servers across the entire site.
I would compile a program for a Sun 3, and needed a way to install the program once, for use on hundreds of computers. Also teams of people on dozens of different computers needed to share files with each other.
This was before SSH. We had to use NFS.
It was fairly seamless and .... interesting.
I did consulting work for a place with Sun 2's and 4's, AIX, HP-UX, Xenix, and SCO. There was NFS, Netware, and UUCP all cheerfully coexisting on an IPv4 network that used a public Class C for NATed internal use. (It's now a zombie IP range that doesn't do anything useful.)
Later, I wrote code a university that had even more heterogeneous clusters.
The problem today is the siloification and bias against system diversity that doesn't account for proper software configuration management and support of multiple platforms. Portability is a dying art.