[TUHS] RFS was: Re: UNIX of choice these days?

[Jon Forrest]

On 9/29/2017 12:19 PM, Dan Cross wrote:

> We had a setup on Sun's running SunOS 4.1.x that I actually really
> liked; I believe it was referred to as "dataless".
[...]
> It was a really nice, comfortable system. Of course, it wouldn't fly
> in this day and age for security and other reasons but back in the
> early 90s it was great.

I agree 100%. I created such an environment on DEC's OSF/1 running
on Alphas (c. f. A Dataless Environment in OSF/1, Digital Systems
Journal - Nov. 1994) when I worked in the CS department at
UC Berkeley. Plus, the CS department itself ran a big Auspex
server that made it possible to create an ad-hoc dataless environment.

At the time, a 600MB disk drive was considered large. Putting all
the read-only stuff on a server made lots of sense. Of course, it
required a reasonably fast network connection, but with 100Mbs networks
starting to get cheap at that time, that wasn't a big deal.

Jon Forrest
UC Berkeley (ret.)