There are some interesting points where current design is almost exactly the same, only slightly developed. Stderr was missing in this paper, for example.
I guess I can't really appreciate the benefit they describe here, because I'd need to know the alternatives and prior art:
> Another important aspect of programming convenience is that there are no “control blocks” with a complicated structure partially maintained by and depended on by the file system or other system calls.
> The discussion of I/O in §3 above seems to imply that every file used by a program must be opened or created by the program in order to get a file descriptor for the file. Programs executed by the Shell, however, start off with two open files which have file descriptors 0 and 1. As such a program begins execution, file 1 is open for writing, and is best understood as the standard output file. Except under circumstances indicated below, this file is the user’s typewriter. Thus programs which wish to write informative or diagnostic information ordinarily use file descriptor 1. Conversely, file 0 starts off open for reading, and programs which wish to read messages typed by the user usually read this file.