[cap-talk] Sharing with OS support

[Jed Donnelley]

At 02:55 AM 12/8/2006, Neal H. Walfield wrote:
>At Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:52:48 -0800,
>Jed at Webstart wrote:
> > At HP last Friday I mentioned a facility that we had at LLNL many
> > years ago that I considered quite helpful/useful in bootstrapping
> > sharing between people.  It had the following properties (sorry if
> > this is a repeat - I see it as relevant here):
>
>Jed, do you have a reference to this system you could point me to?
>
>Thanks,
>Neal

I don't believe there were any documents on that system published
external to LLNL.  The system was known as the "Elephant Storage
System" (an Elephant never forgets of course).  It used devices
like the IBM Photostore:

http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Photostore.dir/

(long term storage) and Datacell:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/datacell.html
http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Storage.dir/images/datacell.jpg

(intermediate storage) to store data for the scientists at LLNL during
the 1970s and 1980s, e.g.:

http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Storage.dir/

However, there were of course internal documents on these systems
and in particular the Elephant Storage system and the directed graph
directory system that I described with the "give" and "take" mechanism
for transferring permissions between users.

As I recall the main document on that mechanism was in the
"File System" chapter of the LTSS series of documents,
Chapter IV.

If I get a chance I'll dig up that document in my basement and
scan in the relevant parts this weekend.  I'll cc some colleagues
to see if they might know of existing on-line documentation
on the Elephant Storage System.

--Jed  http://www.webstart.com/jed-signature.html