User defined files
Kirk A. Bailey, Lee Boynton, Paul E. McKenney, Gary J. Oliver, Dave Regan · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · 1981
In the past, there has been conflict between the application programmer's desire for specialized file types and the system programmer's desire to keep the operating system compact. A solution is proposed that allows a simple file or group of simple files to be encapsulated by a user program. The resulting entity (called a user-defined file) allows arbitrarily complex special-purpose file types to be emulated without continuous modifications to the operating system.