[TUHS] Re: RFS (was Re: Re: forgotten versions)

[Derek Fawcus <dfawcus+lists-tuhs@employees.org>]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 02:28:06PM +0200, Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS wrote:
> 
> > 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.

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