Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 05, 2004 08:42 AM
All of this network file system stuff makes me nostalgic for the ancient days of DEC computers. DECnet on RSX-11M and VMS had a distributed file system in 1980 that in some ways is way ahead of what the Linux and Unix worlds usually have today.
Using DECnet, it was possible to simply prepend the node name ahead of the filename on the remote system, for example:
MYVAX::USERS:[OLSEN.STUFF]FOO.BAR
You could then open such a file in an application across the network and it would sort of work like a local file. How "sort of" depended on the application, but often it was quite impressive. DECnet worked with the local ODS-1 (RSX) or ODS-2 (VMS) file systems, including (optional in RSX, standard in VMS) the built-in indexed file capability.
NFS has nice transparency, but only within the relatively simple Unix file semantics (I know, Unix folks think that's the correct way). But it's done atop UDP, which is ugly and has bad congestion properties. (That's fixed within the NFS V3 application itself, but it took years. DECnet was designed for WAN use, not LAN only as with the early NFS.)
I'm not saying that DECnet in 1980 was something we should go back to, but I am concerned that the past decade and a half has seen too much reinvention of wheels and too little original research.
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Digital Had it Then
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 05, 2004 08:42 AMUsing DECnet, it was possible to simply prepend the node name ahead of the filename on the remote system, for example:
MYVAX::USERS:[OLSEN.STUFF]FOO.BAR
You could then open such a file in an application across the network and it would sort of work like a local file. How "sort of" depended on the application, but often it was quite impressive. DECnet worked with the local ODS-1 (RSX) or ODS-2 (VMS) file systems, including (optional in RSX, standard in VMS) the built-in indexed file capability.
NFS has nice transparency, but only within the relatively simple Unix file semantics (I know, Unix folks think that's the correct way). But it's done atop UDP, which is ugly and has bad congestion properties. (That's fixed within the NFS V3 application itself, but it took years. DECnet was designed for WAN use, not LAN only as with the early NFS.)
I'm not saying that DECnet in 1980 was something we should go back to, but I am concerned that the past decade and a half has seen too much reinvention of wheels and too little original research.
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