The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)
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Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)
#2[deleted]
Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)
#3What I find most interesting about Apollo and DOMAIN/OS is that by 1983 (at the latest, see the Getting Started document [1]) the designers had managed to peer into the future and come up with network filename syntax that matches what would eventually become known as the scheme-relative URI:
//node/directory/subdir/file
> If a pathname begins with two successive characters, the first component following the leading characters may be interpreted in an implementation-defined manner, although more than two leading characters shall be treated as a single character.
[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/002348-01_Getting_Starte...
[2] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1...
Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)
#4I used to use Apollo workstations in the late 1980's (probably around 1988). I used to have a DN3000 on my desk with a massive CRT monitor.
They were pretty heavily used in my company for CAE work, designing printed circuit boards, schematics and later VLSI design. We moved from software called "Racal Redac Visula" to Mentor Graphics at some point.
They were indeed well ahead of their time. I could open a "pad" in the window manager from any machine in the network. The pad was like a infinite text shell, but it was quite elaborate. You could also open up a UNIX shell within the same environment. At the time, I don't think there were many other graphics-rich workstations which were as comprehensive and focussed on computer-aided engineering.
Apollo was acquired by HP after I stopped using them, and ultimately Mentor Graphics software was likely ported to other systems like commodity PC's and Sun Workstations.
Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)
#5I remember using DOMAIN/OS computers at university in 1990, by then it had been acquired by HP. The biggest difference from Unix I first ran into was that you couldn't always kill processes with kill -9, sometimes you had to "Blast" the process if it was waiting / hung on a network lock.
Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)
#6What I find most interesting about Apollo and DOMAIN/OS is that by 1983 (at the latest, see the Getting Started document [1]) the designers had managed to peer into the future and come up with network filename syntax that matches what would eventually become known as the scheme-relative URI: //node/directory/subdir/file This is also (as far as I can tell) the rationale for a rather interesting caveat in the POSIX spe…
//node/directory was pretty common in network file systems, I remember using that on SunOS in the early 80's. I think it was called 'remote file system' on Sunos at the time
Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)
#7What I find most interesting about Apollo and DOMAIN/OS is that by 1983 (at the latest, see the Getting Started document [1]) the designers had managed to peer into the future and come up with network filename syntax that matches what would eventually become known as the scheme-relative URI: //node/directory/subdir/file This is also (as far as I can tell) the rationale for a rather interesting caveat in the POSIX spe…
//node/directory was pretty common in network file systems, I remember using that on SunOS in the early 80's. I think it was called 'remote file system' on Sunos at the time
Ah, interesting, I wasn't aware that this syntax was also in use with SunOS...
Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
//node/directory was pretty common in network file systems, I remember using that on SunOS in the early 80's. I think it was called 'remote file system' on Sunos at the time
Ah, interesting, I wasn't aware that this syntax was also in use with SunOS...
I got curious - SunOS 2 introduced NFS, that was in May 1985, and I was incorrect - it used hostname:/path/... thought I remembered a colon in there somewhere
SunOS history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS
and NFS originally started in 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_File_System
Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)
#9What I find most interesting about Apollo and DOMAIN/OS is that by 1983 (at the latest, see the Getting Started document [1]) the designers had managed to peer into the future and come up with network filename syntax that matches what would eventually become known as the scheme-relative URI: //node/directory/subdir/file This is also (as far as I can tell) the rationale for a rather interesting caveat in the POSIX spe…
This is not a coincidence, nor is it an uncanny ability to see into the future. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the URI/URL naming scheme, worked at CERN, which mostly used Apollos at the time. He modeled URLs after the Apollo naming scheme. "So I just copied Apollo," according to his FAQ.
Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)
#10Windows file sharing (and by extension Samba) came from Apollo. It's little known: