Anyone who uses a personal com-puter will be familiar with the idea of a "graphical user interface", which was introduced in the 1980s and became ubiquitous in the 1990s. It did away with the need to type cryptic keyboard commands to manipulate files, making it possible to manipulate them directly instead, using a mouse: double-click on a file's icon to open it, drag it to the bin to delete it, and drop it on a folder to file it away. All of this made computers far easier to use. But the once-revolutionary notion of files, folders, filing cabinets and other desktop icons is now showing its age. What started out as a helpful metaphor now seems rather limiting. Why hobble digital documents with the limitations of paper ones, such as the need to have a single fixed location? "A lawyer cares about things like dates and cases," says Thomas Rizzo, the head of Microsoft's next-generation file system project, known as WinFS. How can a lawyer file the same document by both client and by date? He cannot, notes Mr Rizzo, without using unwieldy multiple-location workarounds such as aliases and shortcuts.
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