I don't know the exact history of RFS a la System V, but I don't think it was Peter Weinberger's stuff, and it certainly wasn't his code. Nor his name: he called his first version neta and his second netb (he knew it would be changing and allowed for it in the name from the start). I don't remember us ever calling it RFS, or even remote file systems, inside 1127; we called it network file systems (never NFS because the Sun stuff existed by then). For those who don't know it, Peter's goal was quite different from that of NFS. The idea behind NFS seems always to have been to mount a remote file system as if it were local, with a base assumption early on that everything was within the same administrative domain so it was OK to make assumptions about userids matching up, and running code as super-user. Peter described his intent as `I want to be able to use your disks, and that's a lot simpler if I don't have to get you to add code to your kernel, or even to run a program as super-user.' Hence the entirely-user-mode server program, which could use super-user privileges to afford access as any user if it had them, but also worked fine when run as an ordinary user with only that user's file permissions. We did in fact normally run it as super-user so each of our 15 or so VAXes could see the file system tree on each other, but we also occasionally did it otherwise. That was one reason device files worked as they did, accessing the device on the server end rather than acting like a local special file on the client: we didn't care about running diskless clients, but we did occasionally care about accessing a remote system's tape drive. 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. That also means Peter's code was a bit ad-hoc and wonky in places. He cleaned it up considerably between neta and netb, and I did further cleanup later. I even had a go at a library to isolate the network protocol from the server proper, converted the netb server to use it, and made a few demo servers of my own like one to read and write raw FILES-11 file systems--useful for working with the console file system on the VAX 8800 series, which was exported to the host as a block device--and a daemon to allow a tar archive to be mounted as a read-only file system. In modern systems, you can do the same sort of things with FUSE, and set up the same I-want-to-use-your-disks (or I want to get at my own files from afar without privileges) scheme with sshfs. I would be very surprised to learn that either of those borrowed from their ancient cousins in Research UNIX; so far as I know they're independent inventions. Either way I'm glad they exist. Norman Wilson Toronto ON