On Sun, 23 Jun 1996 15:27:08 GMT, John Buller wrote:

>> MS Press Release - Common Internet File System (CIFS)
>> 
>> http://www.microsoft.com/corpinfo/press/1996/jun96/cifs2pr.htm
>> 
>> Data General, Digital, Intel, Intergraph, Network Appliance and Others Join
>> Microsoft in Support of Common Internet File System

>[ Loads of PR stuff deleted. ]

>Is this for real, or just someone trying to do:

>for i in /share/rfc/*
>do
>   ex $i << EOF
>   %s/Sun/Microsoft/g
>   %s/NFS/CIFS/g
>   wq
>   EOF
>done

Sure, NFS has been around for a long time, and it does what they are
saying "CIFS" (really SMB with a new name) does. But:

1) NFS uses Sun RPC which makes it difficult to get through a firewall
in any kind of reasonable fashion without potentially allowing lots of
other (non-RPC) stuff.

2) CIFS is already in place on millions of desktop machines all over the
world, while NFS is still an addon ($$$) option for them.

I think, though, that none of this hoopla could have been at all
justified without the existence of Samba, which brings the protocol to
Unix servers, and so provides a freely available reference
implementation and completes the loop. (Even Novell used Samba to do
their SMB compatibility NLM for Netware).

Hype? Yes. Useful and a "Good Thing(tm)"? Also yes.