From: waleed@cse.unsw.edu.au (Mohammed Waleed Kadous)
Subject: Re: TECH: Virtual Unix FS?
Date: 14 Nov 1995 10:38:47 GMT
Message-ID: <489rjn$kon@mirv.unsw.edu.au>
Organization: University of New South Wales


From: waleed@cse.unsw.edu.au (Mohammed Waleed Kadous)

paul@color.demon.co.uk wrote:
: It occured to me that It would not be too great a step to generate a
: VRML document from the output of a Unix 'find' command. 
[elaboration cut]

Certainly possible and some research has been done along these
lines. I believe the Xerox DigitalDesk research program is
investigating this and other possibilities. But the idea is much older
than that.

Really if you think about it, current GUI operating systems use a
desktop metaphor, but there is no reason at all you couldn't use, say,
a city metaphor as is done in Apple's eWorld on-line system.

: I dont
: know enough about VRML, would it be feasable to have a largish Unix
: file system represented in one VRML document or, would it be best
: broken down into document per room. with hyper links connecting one to
: the other?.  I would be interested in your (pleasant) comments, has
: this already been done?, can you do it?, ideas, is it sad?, or could
: it be an interesting (if not useful) way to view a file system.

It's possible in VRML, but Unix systems hae a tendency to be gigantic,
becuase of things like NFS, which makes it unfeasible to make it into
a single file. It would be much more logical to have a hierarchical
set of directories that matched those of the actual file system - i.e
each directory would be one VRML file, and going into a subdirectory
would take you to another VRML page.

The real advantage would come in future versions of VRML that would
support interaction more comprehensively -- then you could use it to
do things instead of just looking through it..

Cheers, 

Waleed.


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