The contributions of Sun Microsystems to the world of computing are legion – definitely more than its ignominious absorption into Oracle implies – and one of those is NFS, the Network File system. This month, NFS more or less turned 40 years old, and in honour of this milestone, Russel Berg, Russ Cox, Steve Kleiman, Bob Lyon, Tom Lyon, Joseph Moran, Brian Pawlowski, David Rosenthal, Kate Stout, and Geoff Arnold created a website to honour NFS.
This website gathers material related to the Sun Microsystems Network File System, a project that began in 1983 and remains a fundamental technology for today’s distributed computer systems.
[…]The core of the collection is design documents, white papers, engineering specifications, conference and journal papers, and standards material. However it also covers marketing materials, trade press, advertising, books, “swag”, and personal ephemera. We’re always looking for new contributions.
↫ NFS at 40
There’s so many amazing documents here, such as the collection of predecessors of NFS that served as inspiration for NFS, like the Cambridge File Server or the Xerox Alto’s Interim File System, but also tons of fun marketing material for things like NFS server accelerators and nerdy NFS buttons. Even if you’re not specifically interested in the history of NFS, there’s great joy in browsing these old documents and photos.
