The Novelty of the Arpanet

“ The second of these scenarios featured a piece of software called the SRI-ARC Online System being developed at Stanford. This was a fancy piece of software with lots of functionality (it was the software system that Douglas Engelbart demoed in the “Mother of All Demos”), but one of the many things it could do was make use of what was essentially a file hosting service run on the host at UC Santa Barbara. From a terminal at the Washington Hilton, conference attendees could copy a file created at Stanford onto the host at UCSB simply by running a copy command and answering a few of the computer’s questions: “

ii reminds me of typing .. at a / prompt on an AFS connected system and realizing there was more to see above my local system.