Jim Gray talked about this idea in an ACM Queue interview in 2001 [1] calling it a TeraScale SneakerNet box: Another option is to send whole computers. I’ve be

Jim Gray talked about this idea in an ACM Queue interview in 2001 [1] calling it a TeraScale SneakerNet box: Another option is to send whole computers. I’ve been sending NTFS disks (the Windows file system format), and not every Linux system can read NTFS. So lately I’m sending complete computers. We’re now into the 2-terabyte realm, so we can’t actually send a single disk; we need to send a bunch of disks. It’s convenient to send them packaged inside a metal box that just happens to have a processor in it. I know this sounds crazy—but you get an NFS or CIFS server and most people can just plug the thing into the wall and into the network and then copy the data. [1] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=864078 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=864078