As Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson outlined in their 1974 Communications of the ACM paper, "The UNIX Time-Sharing System", there are three main advantages to the "everything is a file" approach: (1) file and device I/O are as similar as possible (2) file and device names have the same syntax and meaning, so that a program expecting a file name as a parameter can be passed a device name (3) special files [/dev/random, etc.] are subject to the same protection mechanism as regular files