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Chapter 8: Local Network Services
Distributed Filesystems
You may find it difficult to imagine a time when PCs simply stood alone without the
benefit of a network or a connection to the Internet. But PCs were not originally
designed with networking in mind. You may or may not remember when people
transferred files by walking floppy disks from one PC to another, or flipped a switch
so two to four users could share a printer. Those were painful times.
After the introduction of the PC, it took a number of years and innovations to cre-
ate such basic networking conveniences as distributed filesystems. Getting those
filesystems working on PCs transformed the landscape of business, because it
allowed us to put a computer on everyone’s desk. No longer did we have to manu-
ally fill out forms for keypunch operators to funnel into batch mainframe systems.
Networking became more available and affordable when an IBM researcher, Barry
Feigenbaum, turned a local DOS filesystem into a distributed one. His efforts helped
create the Server Message Block (SMB) application protocol, and the era of system
administrators and network engineers began.
Distributed filesystems let users open, read, and write files stored on computers
other than their own. In some environments, a single large computer stores files
accessed by all users on the LAN; the central computer can even store the users’
home directories, so