13 Aug
2025
13 Aug
'25
3:26 p.m.
"never made it outside Bell Labs" was a poor choice of words for
"never gained acceptance outside of Bell Labs".
I agree with Dan and Arnold, but I lament the fact that NFS : RFS ::
intranet : internet RFS had the grander vision. To be fair, I must
admit that I have no idea how efficient or robust the released version
was. Certainly the original worked very well.
Doug
On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 11:00 AM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:00 AM Douglas McIlroy
<douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
It was a different RFS, developed by USG. It had full Unix semantics,
including ioctls and fcntl, for machines of the same architecture. It
was stateful, which meant if the server went away, you could hang your
shell at the very least. It first came out in SVR3.
Earlier versions of SunOS 5 supported it; it was dropped in later
versions.
It didn't get widespread support both because NFS had a big head
start, and because by the time it came out, the SVR3 licensing terms
had gotten onerous for most vendors.
No disagreement with the rest of you note. :-)
Arnold I was always sorry that Peter Weinberger's
RFS never made it outside
Bell Labs. It allowed networking between separately administered
systems by mapping UIDs.
I believe it did? If I recall correctly, it was available with System
V, though perhaps I am misremembering.