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I don't understand this part, can someone entangle this? What is the concept of remoteness here?

"Probably the glaring error in Unix was that it underevaluated the concept of remoteness. The open-close-read-write interface should have been encapsulated together as something for remoteness; something that brought a group of interfaces together as a single thing�a remote file system as opposed to a local file system."

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My interpretation is he's lamenting that certain Unix OS abstractions (e.g. open, close, read, and write) do not lend themselves well to building distributed systems, like a distributed filesystem. Plan9, for example, designed it's API with such possibilities in mind.

And, really, I think he's referring to async I/O.

The thing is that Unix grew up w/o a network. Disk was slow though, so perhaps it could have had async I/O from the beginning, but... everything was slow, so maybe not. Most importantly the key is that when one is building something new, often one will build the easy stuff first, and synchronous metadata operations is definitely easier than async -- this is a lot easier to forgive 50 years ago than now because now we know that async matters a great deal, but 50 years ago it was a lot less clear.

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