I’m looking for Sun’s PC-NFS 3.0 (circa 1989), or ideally even older PC-NFS version. The ultimate goal is to get the oldest surviving x86 NFS client going in a VM; it is almost certain that the first such product was Sun’s original PC-NFS in 1986. Unfortunately the oldest PC-NFS versions may not have survived.
I did successfully get PC-NFS 4.0 going in a VM and it can talk to a modern Synology NAS without trouble.
Wasn’t MITs pc ip what was the open competitor?
http://bitsavers.org/bits/MIT/pc-ip/
I don’t think they had NFS, at least not early on. PC/IP had, at least originally, disk sharing — basically a networked block device. Of course PC/IP was started long before DOS 3.1 was available. And they probably weren’t interesting in developing a NetWare style shell. I can’t find any sign of NFS in the 1986 archive of PC/IP.
Sun’s PC-NFS on the other hand always included a redirector I believe.
PC/TCP, the commercial successor of PC/IP, did include a NFS client, though I’m not sure when that was introduced. I could quickly find that it was advertised as part of PC/TCP Plus in 1989 (InfoWorld ad). Beame & Whiteside and Wollongong Pathway also had DOS NFS clients.
Side track: How were files shared when only sharing disk/block devices?
Were one client the only one allowed write access and the others had just to take a chance that the data written on disk were in a consistent state?
Or were the concept really that an admin filled a normally read-only drive with whatever stuff a bunch of users needed, and otherwise everyone had their own R/W disk on the network, and didn’t share files with each other?
Simple – files weren’t shared. We’re talking circa 1983, when hard disks were far from standard. And Ethernet was not at all slow compared to hard disks of the era. Typically every user would have their own disk image on the network.
Well, I were refering to sharing files between different user, all residing on the server.
Seems a bit backwards if you have a network but still needs to use floppys to share a file with a coworker.
There must had been some other way to handle files too. Maybe FTP?