It's important to note, when talking about NFS, that there was Sun's NFS and everyone else's NFS. Sun ran their entire company on NFS. /usr/dist was where all the software that was not part of SunOS lived, it was an NFS mounted volume (that was replicated to each subnet). It was heavily used as were a lot of other things. The automounter at Sun just worked, wanted to see your buddies stuff? You just cd-ed to it and it worked. Much like mmap, NFS did not export well to other companies. When I went to SGI I actually had a principle engineer (like Suns distinguished engineer) tell me "nobody trusts NFS, use rcp if you care about your data". What. The. Fuck. At Sun, NFS just worked. All the time. The idea that it would not work was unthinkable and if it ever did not work it got fixed right away. Other companies, it was a checkbox thing, it sorta worked. That was an eye opener for me. mmap was the same way, Sun got it right and other companies sort of did.