20 Jun
2022
20 Jun
'22
11:53 p.m.
On Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 02:28:06PM +0200, Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS wrote:
Interesting, given the earlier mention of SMB. As I recall, the MS-DOS Redirector
interface is sort of at a similar level, but probably a lot more messy in terms of how the
internal 'interfaces' are exposed.
That was in DOS 3.0, which according to Wikipedia was released in April '85, with 8th
edition being around Feb '85, I guess they may have been done in parallel?
DF
Peter, being a self-described fan of cheap hacks,
also wasn't
inclined to spend much time thinking about general abstractions;
in effect he just turned various existing kernel subroutines
(when applied to a network file system) into RPCs. The
structure of the file system switch was rather UNIX-specific,
reflecting that.
Yes, well put. I’ve back ported his filesystem switch to V6/V7 and it is very light
touch: on the PDP11 it added only some 500 bytes of kernel code (after some
refactoring).
With hindsight it seems such a logical idea, certainly in a context where the labs were
experimenting with remote system calls in the mid 70’s (Heinz Lycklama's work on
satellite Unix) and early 80’s (Gottfried Luderer et al. on distributed Unix — another
forgotten version). It is such a powerful abstraction, but apparently very elusive to
invent.