[ih] Distributed file systems [was: As Flag Day approaches at CMU]

[Barbara Denny]

The name Rick Schantz popped up in my head.  He was doing some work in this area in the 70s and later?  Here are a couple links that might lead you to more info if you can get them. I don't have ready access to the IBM one. It mentions distributed file systems in the abstract.
https://research.ibm.com/publications/interprocess-communication-systems 

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://eecs.wsu.edu/~cs565/Papers/Schantz-DistSysBBN1970-1995.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjZ-Z245uWPAxU3EEQIHYYiN2IQFnoECCEQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1qfpTTB6K2dytZx3kBry29
The reference above is a chapter on distributed computing at BBN.
I am very sad to have to report that he also has passed away.  It is getting difficult to search for people .
https://schlossbergchapel.com/obituary/richard-schantz/
barbara

    On Wednesday, September 10, 2025 at 09:27:23 PM PDT, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 Hi Barbara,

That makes total sense, and I doubt if Brian Randell would be surprised. I've put him in Bcc in case he wants to comment.

The Named Data Networking project is still tackling this space:
https://named-data.net/project/execsummary/

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 11-Sep-25 15:41, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote:
>  I was curious about the potential influence of the Unix United paper on work at CMU so I decided to just ask Satya. In my message to him, I included the part starting with  the sentence "AFS in particular *must* .."  and the 2 examples that follow from Brian's email.
> I did tell him I wanted to post his answer to this list and he hasn't said no so ...
> Excuse my trimming of the thread.  I seem to have problems posting to the list, especially when the body of the message is long.
> 
> barbara
> 
> ----- Forwarded Message -----From: Mahadev Satyanarayanan <satya at cs.cmu.edu>To: Barbara Denny <b_a_denny at yahoo.com>Sent: Monday, September 8, 2025 at 01:45:16 PM PDTSubject: Re: AFS question
> Hi Barbara,
> The Unix United paper (aka "Newcastle Connection") was published in
> 1982.  We were indeed aware of that work by mid-1983, when serious
> work on what eventually led to AFS began.  The name "Andrew" for the
> whole project did not emerge until late 1985.  In fact, the first
> published paper on AFS did not even use the name "AFS".  It referred
> to the system as "The ITC Distributed File System" and the server
> and client components as "Vice" and "Virtue" respectively.
> Here is that very first AFS paper, from 1985:
>      https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/323647.323633
> 
> Alas, the influence of Unix United on AFS was quite the opposite of
> what the person who spoke with you thinks.  We actively worked hard to
> AVOID an aspect of Unix United that we thought was totally wrong.
>  From the beginning we believed that AFS needed to have Location
> Transparency.  i.e. you could not tell where a file was located by
> just looking at its pathname.  You had to ask the system to tell you,
> and that location could change over time.  The 1985 paper explicitly
> contrasts AFS with the design of Unix United.  If you look at
> Section 6.1 in the above paper, it says this:
>>
>> Location transparency is a key issue in this context. In Locus,
>> Vice-Virtue, Apollo and Roe it is not possible to deduce the
>> location of a file by examing its name. In contrast, the Cedar File
>> System and the Newcastle Connection embed storage site information
>> in pathnames.
>>
> 
> Location transparency was identified as a non-negotiable requirement
> of AFS since the very earliest conception of its design.  See, for
> example, this September 1983 design document:
>    http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/itc/CMU-ITC-008.pdf
> 
> BTW, there is a whole treasure trove of very early (1983-1985) design
> documents from the ITC (Andrew project) at
>    http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/itc85.html
> Many things evolved over time, of course, but these early documents
> capture the state of thinking at the time they were written.
> 
> So the answer to your colleague is "Yes, Unix United was a big
> influence on AFS, but in a totally negative way".  You may wish
> to soften the blow in how you present it to him/her :-)
> 
> Cheers
>                --- Satya
> 
> On Saturday, September 6, 2025 at 06:55:51 PM PDT,
> 
>   Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> "MIT wasn't the only place where the IMP became the de facto local area net."
> 
> Which reminded me of Scrapbook at NPL. It was an early hyperlinked system but was also a (small scale) distributed file system by the mid 1970s. It was not widely known and is badly documented.
> 
> I happened to meet and interview one of the Scrapbook team last year:
> https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/research/groups/CDMTCS/researchreports/download.php?selected-id=884
> 
> The Andrew File System and its descendants, like NFS, only came along in the 1980s. AFS in particular *must* have been influenced by the Unix United paper, which had examples like:
> 
> cd /../unix2/user/brian
> quicksort a > /../unix1/user/brian/b
> 
> (where unix1 and unix2 were host names, and brian wasn't me, it was Brian Randell.)
> 
> Regards/Ngā mihi
>      Brian Carpenter