[inforoots] NFS

[John C Green Jr]

The GRiD thread mentioned NFS.

Sun held a Connectathon before the 1986 NCC.  Any company
wanting to demonstrate NFS at NCC had to attend Connectathon.
I worked for Alliant Computer Systems at the time.  We had
some very good Unix programmers.  Anyway a demo screen was
available in our booth (and probably many others) indicating
which systems were up and which weren't.  The Sun and Alliant
systems were two of very few that stayed up all day.

Alliant shipped NFS in a general release (not just beta to
a customer or two) soon after NCC 1986 I'd guess AUG or SEP.
It's likely that we were second only to Sun to do so.

At a recent joint Computer History Museum / Software Development
Forum event that Eric Schmidt spoke at I asked him if he was
involved in Sun acquiring rights to Plexus Computer Systems's
Network Operating System (NOS).  He had a strong memory of it
as he was the Sun Executive who signed the contract.  The big
improvement Bill Joy made was figuring out how to make NFS
stateless when NOS wasn't.

Plexus ran the complay on NOS.  Few customers used it.

Regards,
John Green