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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

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?

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?