IO devices were also mounted/manipulable within this filesystem. So you could mount your home keyboard/mouse/monitor to your remote workstation (maybe an HPC bo

IO devices were also mounted/manipulable within this filesystem. So you could mount your home keyboard/mouse/monitor to your remote workstation (maybe an HPC box in some datacenter) and continue working where you left off. Java tried something similar with Jini but without the powerful abstract of everything being a file descriptor in some hierarchical mapping.