Bob Rogers (from IBM's Washington Systems Center) undertook the challenge of justifying distribution of NFS support as a DFP feature. He talked in general terms about the capabilities of NFS, since most of the MVS people there had no idea what he was on about anyway.

NFS is a "Network File System" server, which is used to make the MVS file system available on local area networks which use TCP/IP. IBM has decided to implement TCP/IP as a separate product, but they made NFS a feature of DFP because they figured it kinda looks like an access method, so let's bundle it with most of the other access methods.

Actually, NFS doesn't look like any access method you ever saw. It is stateless and doesn't have an explicit OPEN or CLOSE.

The NFS feature is written in C! There appears to be a move afoot within IBM to use high-level languages other than PL/S (as an example, SCLM was written in Pascal). One limitation of this approach is that you must be licensed for the C (or Pascal) runtime libraries in order to use these products. Perhaps with the consolidation of runtime libraries into the CEE this will not be such a problem.