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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

> To get the big picture of performance evolution over time, I downloaded all 52 releases of fastDOOM, PCDOOMv2, and the original DOOM.EXE, wrote a go program to generate a RUN.BAT running -timedemo demo1 on all of them, and mounted it all with mTCP's NETDRIVE.

I'm probably not the real target audience here, but that looked interesting; I didn't think there were good storage-over-network options that far back. A little searching turns up https://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP_NetDrive.html - that's really cool:)

> NetDrive is a DOS device driver that allows you to access a remote disk image hosted by another machine as though it was a local device with an assigned drive letter. The remote disk image can be a floppy disk image or a hard drive image.

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> I didn't think there were good storage-over-network options that far back.

Back in school in the early 90s we had one computer lab where around 25 Mac Plus machines were daisy chained via AppleTalk to a Mac II. All of the Plus machines mounted their filesystem from the Mac II. It was painfully slow, students lost 5-10 minutes at the start of class trying to get the word processor started. Heck, the Xerox Altos also used network mounts for their drives.

If you have networking the first thing someone wants to do is copy files, and the most ergonomic way is to make it look just like a local filesystem.

DOS was a bit behind the curve because there was no networking built-in, so you had to do a lot of the legwork yourself.

There was already relatively deep penetration of this stuff in the corporate world and universities way back in the early 1990s.

Where I want to school we had AFS. You could sit down at any Unix workstation and login and it looked like your personal machine. Your entire desktop & file environment was there and the environment automatically pointed all your paths at the correct binaries for that machine. (While we were there I remember using Sun, IBM, and SGI workstations in this environment.)

When Windows came on campus it felt like the stone ages as none of this stuff worked and SMB was horrible in comparison.

These days it feels like distributed file systems are used less and less in lieu of having to upload everything to various web based cloud systems.

In some ways it feels like everything has become less and less friendly with the loss of desktop apps in favor of everything in the browser.

I guess I do use OneDrive, but it doesn't seem particularly good, even compared to 1990s options.

I was using HP Apollo systems with the Aegis OS in the early 90s, and they basically shared one filesystem across their token-ring network. Plug in two or more systems, login to one of them, and each other system's files would be under //othersystem.

I don't recall whether there were any security-minded limits you could put on what was shared, but for a team that was meant to share everything, it was pretty handy.

I miss those days often. I have more than once computer, why it it such a big deal to share my filesystem. But many things don't work if you try (firefox for example doesn't like sharing settings that way). The web is great for some things, but local applications are often much more powerful and faster.

My school had Windows NT and the experience was similar. Any workstation looked the same and had my data.

Later I saw some Citrix setups which would load the applications from the server. That also worked pretty OK.

With Windows you definitely had all the options to make this work in the late 90s.

With Windows, a lot of this is down to software using AppData\(Remote|Local|LocalLow) correctly. Named differently in NT but conceptually it was there all along. The problem back then was that, since 9x didn't have this separation, relatively few apps bothered to do it right.

> There was already relatively deep penetration of this stuff in the corporate world and universities way back in the early 1990s.

Anyone remember Novell NetWare?

Appletalk was horribly slow - 230.4 kbit/s. Ethernet was already 10mbit at the time (but a lot more expensive). General best practice would have been having the world processor installed on each machine and only saving files across the network, which would have made performance acceptable - but at the cost of needing a hard drive in all those plus machines (I don't recall the price a a harddrive at the time, but I'm guessing closer to $1000 for 20mb, compared to multi tb drives for around $100 today)

> the worLd processor

made my day :)

you did have networking? waw

not here.. that's why Floppy-net was something.. as well as bus-304-net (like, write a floppy, hop on bus 304, go to other campus)

In school they were proud to teach us word perfect - the same thing industry uses! by the time I finished nobody used it anymore.

AppleTalk over LocalTalk cables was slow -- AppleTalk could run over Ethernet at Ethernet speeds.

There is a neat trick where ipxe can netboot dos from an iscsi target, with no drivers or config dos gets read write access to a network share(well, not a share, if you share it it gets corrupted fast, a network block device). it feels magical but I think ipxe is patching the bios to make disk access go over iscsi.

I’m curious: were there NAS’ or WebDAV mount in the DOS era? Obviously there was FTP and telnet and such. Just curious if remote mounts was a thing, or if the low bandwidth made it impossible

Yes, there was Novell Netware that let you mount remote drives, and there were even file locking APIs in DOS to organize simultaneous access to files. In fact, DOOM's multiplayer code relied on part of Novell Netware stack (IPXODI and LSL). The remote mounts were mainly used on LANs though, not over Internet.

Yes, it's basically what Netware was, and Novell was a HUGE company.

SMB (samba) is also from the DOS era. Most people only know of it from Windows, though.

There were various other ways to make network "drives" as the DOS drive interface was very simplistic and easy to grab onto.

It was rare to find this stuff until Win95 make network connections "free" (before then, you had to buy the networking hardware and often the software, separately!).

In the 90s my student union ran a computer network mainly for gaming with DOS PCs and netware running on a Linux server with MARS. This was before they had internet access but it was great for lan gaming: command & conquer, doom, or quake. All games were started from network mounts. Fun times.

A network redirector interface (for 'redirecting' local resource access over a network) was added at least by DOS 3.1 in 1985, possibly earlier in 3.0 (1984)

[1] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/redirectors-and-dos-3-0/

WebDAV itself dates from 1999, well into the Windows 95 era. The Novell system pre dates it by a lot.

WebDAV didn't come out until the back half of the 90s, and it was slow to be adopted at first.

Back in the day, you could author a web page directly in GruntPage, and publish it straight to your web server provided said server had the FPSE (FrontPage Server Extensions), a proprietary Microsoft add-on, installed. WebDAV was like the open-standards response to that. Eventually in later versions of FrontPage the FPSE was deprecated and support for WebDAV was provided.

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