Thank you to whoever added me to this list! I have been a UNIX & C disciple since 1982. I spent much of the 1980s writing UNIX, BSD, and OSF/1 device drivers. I ran "madhat", the first public access USENET site in Huntsville. Madhat was a homebuilt 68000 running Unisoft's port of System V Release 0. I also set up "uahcs1", the first UNIX and USENET host at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). Uahcs1 was a Unisys U7000, originally known as the Power 6/32 minicomputer developed by Computer Consoles Inc., running their port of 4.3 BSD. During my career I have worked with UNIX v7, UNIX System V, AIX, BSD, HPUX, IRIX, Linux, MkLinux, OSF/1, Solaris, SunOS, Ultrix, and Xenix, as well as variants such as Mach, Minix, and Xinu. All of my currently active systems run various versions of macOS. In the past my home office was a Microsoft-Free Zone (tm) but alas too many clients insisted on the use of "Word" so I was forced to compromise and partially surrender to the Dark Side (but only in a Windoze VM). One of my current hobby projects is building a RISC processor using 1980 technology, specifically the Am2900 family of bit-slice components. I call it Project Madhat. My goal is to perform as well as a VAX-11/780 at least for integer code. I hope it will eventually run 4.4 BSD. If interested you can read about it here. http://www.xavax.com/madhat/ My professional work is fragmented. For years I've been developing a Massively-Parallel Processor based on the NXP (formerly Freescale or Motorola) T4240 which has 12 PowerPC e6500 cores and built-in Serial RapidIO. The execution units will run a lean microkernel but the overall system will be managed by some flavor of UNIX. I don't currently have any information about the MPP online without an NDA, but I would be happy to answer general questions about it. I was recently motivated by the Russo-Ukraine war to start a company called Trident Droneworks. It is developing systems for the Ukrainian military. If interested you can read about that here. http://tridentdroneworks.com/ Thanks again for adding me. I look forward to discussing UNIX lore. -- Phillip L Harbison

On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:00 AM Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote: I believe it did? If I recall correctly, it was available with System V, though perhaps I am misremembering. I have no doubt that RFS was technically superior to NFS, but Sun had non-technical market advantages. Assuming that I am remembering correctly, I suspect it was unsuccessful commercially for two reasons: 1. Sun gave NFS (and the associated RPC layer) away for free, under a particularly liberal license, which lead to lots of interoperability (Larry's and Dave's comments notwithstanding). I suspect by the time RFS was available, it was much more expensive and less interoperable across heterogeneous systems. 2. Sun was quite adamant that NFS be stateless, and also not tied to Unix filesystem semantics, whereas (as I understood it) RFS was both stateful and deeply imbued with Unix semantics. Related to (2), while the File System Switch that was developed to support RFS was very elegant, I think that Sun's "vnode" architecture was seen as more flexible, permitting Unix to incorporate support for all sorts of foreign filesystem types (useful when CD-ROMs and things like floppy disks using the MS-DOS FAT format started becoming common). I suppose RFS could have been adapted to use vnodes, but by then it probably wasn't considered worth the effort due to lack of adoption. It may be worth mentioning that some NFS implementations are configurable for UID remapping in the server. I recall Sun environments with NFS and NIS (the mechanism for distributing /etc/passwd, groups, and other administrative data around a network). It was a really pleasant environment, and extremely productive. Properly configured, you could log into essentially any machine on the network and have access to your home directory, common data, locally installed programs (that of course lived on NFS), and so on. It was quite common to tell a colleague to just have a look in your home directory for something you were working on, facilitating collaboration, and so on. Diskless and "dataless" machines were common; the latter being machines that mounted _most_ things from a central NFS server, but had the operating system itself (really, /, /usr and /tmp) locally installed on a disk. It required a lot of effort to maintain, since Unix machines were still fundamentally meant to be standalone, and it wasn't as elegant as Plan 9 ultimately was, but it was very nice for the time. - Dan C.

"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:

Am Mi., 13. Aug. 2025 um 17:00 Uhr schrieb <arnold(a)skeeve.com>: Was that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_File_Sharing ? If so, that article wants some love from an expert. And what became of it? Best Martin

On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:18:34AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote: Sunos had it, my office mate ported it. I was unimpressed, it worked well between the same archs but was riddled with byte order problems and ioctl calls that were not portable.

BTW, my own opinions abut NFS can be seen in my "NFS Must Die!" talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF_djcccKc&ab_channel=TomLyon Not that NFS *was* bad - but it *is* bad (for non-casual use). Like the C language, it was great for its time. Not so much anymore. On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 9:24 AM Peter Weinberger (温博格) via TUHS < tuhs(a)tuhs.org&gt; wrote:

From my own experience, no real depth of knowledge here... I use NFS for my home shares. Painless with automount and nfsv4. I can't speak to widespread use in enterprise, but as a "casual" nfs user, it gets the job done nicely. I share a folder called ark from one of my servers and mount it on all of my machines. The ark lives on a mirrored zpool that is frequently snapshotted to another mirrored zpool on another server (I'm less of a zfs casual user, but that's an aside). I haven't lost a bit this way in the couple of years since I stood up the nfs share and I offloaded about 1TB of stuff I like to have on hand to the server. I tried Samba, ick, seems like windowism to me and I tried some NAS stuff, but nfs was fastest and simplest. I haven't really found anything better that works as painlessly as nfs, though I do look into alternatives every so often. What else to try? Thanks, Will On 8/13/25 11:43 AM, Tom Lyon wrote:

No collaborators. Not that I'm trying at all, the talk kinda got the urge out of my system. I therorize that many people could benefit - but no hard data. On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 6:41 PM Bakul Shah &lt;bakul(a)iitbombay.org&gt; wrote:

On 8/13/2025 7:31 PM, Jonathan Gray wrote: That's consistent with my memory. In particular, if I recall correctly, when I was still at IBM and we wanted to include NFS in AIX 3, it was challenging ($$$) to negotiate a satisfactory license for NFS, but we eventually obtained a license to include NFS in all IBM products (not just AIX). -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/mas.to: CharlesHSauer

Indeed, IBM had quite broad support for NFS. There's a whole chapter in this Redbook (1993) about OS/2 NFS clients working with AIX, MVS, VM, and OS/2 servers. https://ia801201.us.archive.org/11/items/gg243531/gg243531_TCPIP_2_0_for_OS… On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 5:54 PM Charles H. Sauer (he/him) < sauer(a)technologists.com&gt; wrote: