Linked by Will Varfar on Tue 3rd Aug 2004 05:32 UTC
This article offers feature suggestions to budding OS developers looking for that neat edge.
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VMS did this years ago over DECnet. VMS always had a separate 'root' for each file system. It had its advantages and disadvantages, certainly. To get to the system stuff you just typed
$set def sys$system
To get back to your own directory, you typed
$set def sys$login
The symbols, roughly equivilant to / and ~, (though there were hundreds of others) held the file system together for convenience.
The actual command to go to a specific device (be it disk or network directory) was
$set def filesystem:[directory.subdirectory]
or if you wanted to see the root of that disk, it was
$set def filesystem:[000000]
The syntax was sometimes cumbersome, but it allowed things like this:
$set def remotemachine::[directory]
To copy a file from a remote machine *without having to mount anything* you could type
$copy remotemachine::filesystem:[directory]filename.type;version *.*;* - this would copy the remote file to whatever directory you were in, and preserve the name, type, and version number. The remote machine's decnet server would decide if you had authorization to touch that filesystem, and would usually be configured to have a default file system, so you could omit the filesystem part of the path.
Just some observations. It's been done.