I worked on an educational title in the 80's which taught people what computers were, and how to use them. It focused on the basics - what is memory, how does a computer use it, what are files and folders.

I had a few thousand happy customers and would hear from folks whose computing competence had been lifted by the titles I worked on .. that they finally 'got it' when the difference between memory, storage, files and folders was finally clear to them.

It is incredibly frustrating to realize that these apps I wrote in the 80's are still entirely relevant today. Too many times I've been in someones business office, and observed some new generation folks not quite understanding where things are stored, how they're stored, why and when to the use ~/Documents and ~/Downloads and ~/Desktop, and so on. Some folks just put everything on ~/Desktop and wonder why they can't find anything. Some folks thoroughly enjoy being coached through creating their own organization systems, for the first time, at the filesystem.

For the past 30 years I've been printing to PDF every interesting web page I've ever read. I now have a collection of 80,000+ .PDF files, in one folder, a huge collection of my personal knowledge and interests. It is immensely rewarding to "ls -l | grep <some interesting subject>" and get a sorted list .. to see also how I have revisited certain subjects over time ..

And now I'm faced with the issue that I just really want to data-mine this archive, so .. of course .. I'm looking at using an LLM to organize it all. One of the very first things I want it to do is sort everything into folders, by subject, and soft-link files into these hierarchical folders so that I can view the tree as a form of ontology. This is the filesystem, becoming very valuable to me as a user.

Yet, everything the OS vendors seem to be doing lately appears to be to remove the users control over their filesystems. I wish there was as much effort in making the File Browser/Explorer as useful as, say, has been put into making the browser the operating system. Sometimes I think the File Explorer versus Browser dichotomy has been seriously mis-managed by the major players over the past few decades.

I hope we see new paradigms for dealing with ontologies emerge into the mainstream .. else, I suppose, I'll have to build one myself ..