I’m curious: were there NAS’ or WebDAV mount in the DOS era? Obviously there was FTP and telnet and such. Just curious if remote mounts was a thing, or if the low bandwidth made it impossible
Yes, there was Novell Netware that let you mount remote drives, and there were even file locking APIs in DOS to organize simultaneous access to files. In fact, DOOM's multiplayer code relied on part of Novell Netware stack (IPXODI and LSL). The remote mounts were mainly used on LANs though, not over Internet.
Yes, it's basically what Netware was, and Novell was a HUGE company.
SMB (samba) is also from the DOS era. Most people only know of it from Windows, though.
There were various other ways to make network "drives" as the DOS drive interface was very simplistic and easy to grab onto.
It was rare to find this stuff until Win95 make network connections "free" (before then, you had to buy the networking hardware and often the software, separately!).
In the 90s my student union ran a computer network mainly for gaming with DOS PCs and netware running on a Linux server with MARS. This was before they had internet access but it was great for lan gaming: command & conquer, doom, or quake. All games were started from network mounts. Fun times.
A network redirector interface (for 'redirecting' local resource access over a network) was added at least by DOS 3.1 in 1985, possibly earlier in 3.0 (1984)
WebDAV didn't come out until the back half of the 90s, and it was slow to be adopted at first.
Back in the day, you could author a web page directly in GruntPage, and publish it straight to your web server provided said server had the FPSE (FrontPage Server Extensions), a proprietary Microsoft add-on, installed. WebDAV was like the open-standards response to that. Eventually in later versions of FrontPage the FPSE was deprecated and support for WebDAV was provided.
