> I walk up to any of them and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory on the server, and it just, i've got my stuff, where ever I am. And none of that is on a local hard disk.<p>You can do all of this with NIS and NFS (and, in-fact, NeXT did. In NeXTStep, NIS (aka YP) was known as NetInfo.