[TUHS] Re: NFS 40th anniversary event

[arnold@skeeve.com]

Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:00 AM Douglas McIlroy
> <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > 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.

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