There's something so comfy about these old systems, even though most of them were released before I was born. Perhaps it's just nostalgia for the days of constant improvement.
You can see some of these on "deramp"'s videos (he is selling Altair clones, but even so the videos are great demos).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5b1Xowxdk
The next upgrade to this is something like the AC-30 for SWTPC. It does exactly the same thing, except uses cassette tape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLvfUJd5PjQ
Then came disk drives, but no DOS. Instead they use disk the same way you used the cassette:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdCnj8iL1hI
It was up to you to remember which track your file was on..
Next step: file names, but no automatic space management:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4xmZwcM52w
You write files sequentially to the disk, and you can only write to the end. When you delete there are holes. You can run a defrag program to recover the space.
This stuff was all just before my time, but there were vestiges of it in later operating systems in the early 80s.
When I see one of these articles really I wished I kept them, but I know I would rarely use them instead of BSD/Linux. But nostalgia seems to get stronger as you age. You know, good-ole-days and all :)
It was slower though, so you had time to breathe. Today the pace of "constant" is insane, and I'm not convinced of the "improvement" part.