Why is “Everything is a File” unique to Unix operating systems?

On the linked superuser site there is repeatedly mentioned that Mac OS X is build "on top" of Unix. This is not quite right. OS X has a BSD userland, but in many ways its developers thought differently.<p>For example "/dev/audio" doesn't exist on OS X. CoreAudio is taking a different route than the "everything is a file" Unix approach.

It may be handy at one level to treat everything as a file. But squashing complex objects through the file api is a hack. I'd hope somebody had some better ideas in the last 20 years.

Googling on the topic, I found: <a href="http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/programming_books/art_of_unix_programming/ch03s02_3.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/programming_books/art...</a><p>An interesting discussion of how Window NT's lack of everything-is-a-file and standard command line tools metastasizes into a security and configuration nightmare. It gives an idea of how important unix's the <i>unifying metaphors</i> are for creating a good operating system.

In DOS everything was a file too. Its not just *nix.