4 ms·

> I didn't think there were good storage-over-network options that far back. Back in school in the early 90s we had one computer lab where around 25 Mac Plus

> I didn't think there were good storage-over-network options that far back. Back in school in the early 90s we had one computer lab where around 25 Mac Plus machines were daisy chained via AppleTalk to a Mac II. All of the Plus machines mounted their filesystem from the Mac II. It was painfully slow, students lost 5-10 minutes at the start of class trying to get the word processor started. Heck, the Xerox Altos also used network mounts for their drives. If you have networking the first thing someone wants to do is copy files, and the most ergonomic way is to make it look just like a local filesystem. DOS was a bit behind the curve because there was no networking built-in, so you had to do a lot of the legwork yourself.

ben7799 2y ago
There was already relatively deep penetration of this stuff in the corporate world and universities way back in the early 1990s. Where I want to school we had AFS. You could sit down at any Unix workstation and login and it looked like your personal machine. Your entire desktop & file environment was there and the environment automatically pointed all your paths at the correct binaries for that machine. (While we were there I remember using Sun, IBM, and SGI workstations in this environment.) When Windows came on campus it felt like the stone ages as none of this stuff worked and SMB was horrible in comparison. These days it feels like distributed file systems are used less and less in lieu of having to upload everything to various web based cloud systems. In some ways it feels like everything has become less and less friendly with the loss of desktop apps in favor of everything in the browser. I guess I do use OneDrive, but it doesn't seem particularly good, even compared to 1990s options.
- aaronbaugher 2y ago
  I was using HP Apollo systems with the Aegis OS in the early 90s, and they basically shared one filesystem across their token-ring network. Plug in two or more systems, login to one of them, and each other system's files would be under //othersystem. I don't recall whether there were any security-minded limits you could put on what was shared, but for a team that was meant to share everything, it was pretty handy.
- bluGill 2y ago
  I miss those days often. I have more than once computer, why it it such a big deal to share my filesystem. But many things don't work if you try (firefox for example doesn't like sharing settings that way). The web is great for some things, but local applications are often much more powerful and faster.
- aeyes 2y ago
  My school had Windows NT and the experience was similar. Any workstation looked the same and had my data. Later I saw some Citrix setups which would load the applications from the server. That also worked pretty OK. With Windows you definitely had all the options to make this work in the late 90s.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    With Windows, a lot of this is down to software using AppData\(Remote|Local|LocalLow) correctly. Named differently in NT but conceptually it was there all along. The problem back then was that, since 9x didn't have this separation, relatively few apps bothered to do it right.
- brazzy 2y ago
  > There was already relatively deep penetration of this stuff in the corporate world and universities way back in the early 1990s. Anyone remember Novell NetWare?
bluGill 2y ago
Appletalk was horribly slow - 230.4 kbit/s. Ethernet was already 10mbit at the time (but a lot more expensive). General best practice would have been having the world processor installed on each machine and only saving files across the network, which would have made performance acceptable - but at the cost of needing a hard drive in all those plus machines (I don't recall the price a a harddrive at the time, but I'm guessing closer to $1000 for 20mb, compared to multi tb drives for around $100 today)
- svilen_dobrev 2y ago
  > the worLd processor made my day :) you did have networking? waw not here.. that's why Floppy-net was something.. as well as bus-304-net (like, write a floppy, hop on bus 304, go to other campus)
  - bluGill 2y ago
    In school they were proud to teach us word perfect - the same thing industry uses! by the time I finished nobody used it anymore.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  AppleTalk over LocalTalk cables was slow -- AppleTalk could run over Ethernet at Ethernet speeds.

ben7799 2y ago

There was already relatively deep penetration of this stuff in the corporate world and universities way back in the early 1990s. Where I want to school we had AFS. You could sit down at any Unix workstation and login and it looked like your personal machine. Your entire desktop & file environment was there and the environment automatically pointed all your paths at the correct binaries for that machine. (While we were there I remember using Sun, IBM, and SGI workstations in this environment.) When Windows came on campus it felt like the stone ages as none of this stuff worked and SMB was horrible in comparison. These days it feels like distributed file systems are used less and less in lieu of having to upload everything to various web based cloud systems. In some ways it feels like everything has become less and less friendly with the loss of desktop apps in favor of everything in the browser. I guess I do use OneDrive, but it doesn't seem particularly good, even compared to 1990s options.

aaronbaugher 2y ago
I was using HP Apollo systems with the Aegis OS in the early 90s, and they basically shared one filesystem across their token-ring network. Plug in two or more systems, login to one of them, and each other system's files would be under //othersystem. I don't recall whether there were any security-minded limits you could put on what was shared, but for a team that was meant to share everything, it was pretty handy.
bluGill 2y ago
I miss those days often. I have more than once computer, why it it such a big deal to share my filesystem. But many things don't work if you try (firefox for example doesn't like sharing settings that way). The web is great for some things, but local applications are often much more powerful and faster.
aeyes 2y ago
My school had Windows NT and the experience was similar. Any workstation looked the same and had my data. Later I saw some Citrix setups which would load the applications from the server. That also worked pretty OK. With Windows you definitely had all the options to make this work in the late 90s.
- int_19h 2y ago
  With Windows, a lot of this is down to software using AppData\(Remote|Local|LocalLow) correctly. Named differently in NT but conceptually it was there all along. The problem back then was that, since 9x didn't have this separation, relatively few apps bothered to do it right.
brazzy 2y ago
> There was already relatively deep penetration of this stuff in the corporate world and universities way back in the early 1990s. Anyone remember Novell NetWare?

bluGill 2y ago

Appletalk was horribly slow - 230.4 kbit/s. Ethernet was already 10mbit at the time (but a lot more expensive). General best practice would have been having the world processor installed on each machine and only saving files across the network, which would have made performance acceptable - but at the cost of needing a hard drive in all those plus machines (I don't recall the price a a harddrive at the time, but I'm guessing closer to $1000 for 20mb, compared to multi tb drives for around $100 today)

svilen_dobrev 2y ago
> the worLd processor made my day :) you did have networking? waw not here.. that's why Floppy-net was something.. as well as bus-304-net (like, write a floppy, hop on bus 304, go to other campus)
- bluGill 2y ago
  In school they were proud to teach us word perfect - the same thing industry uses! by the time I finished nobody used it anymore.
KerrAvon 2y ago
AppleTalk over LocalTalk cables was slow -- AppleTalk could run over Ethernet at Ethernet speeds.