ABSTRACT
Why do we need an I/O stack? What is the importance of various layers in the stack? Why do we need I/O libraries?
There was a time when computers mostly exported data to magnetic tape or punch cards. I/O was pretty simple in those days, but there were still important principles a programmer needed to think about in order to read, write and store data efficiently. Instead of writing a byte of time, programs would aggregate data into fields, records, or collections of records. By exploiting redundance, programmers used data compression in order to write it more quickly and store it more efficiently.
