Protocols such as NFS (Unix) or SMB (Windows) are overly complex for 8 bit systems. While NFS is well documented, it's a complex RPC based protocol. SMB is much worse. It is also a complex RPC based protocol, but it's also proprietary, poorly documented, and implementations differ so much that to get something that works with a reasonable subset of SMB would add a great deal of unwanted complexity. The Samba project has been going for years and they still haven't finished making it bug-for-bug compatible with the various versions of Windows!
At the other end, there's FTP, but FTP is not great for a general file system protocol for 8 bit systems - it requires two TCP sockets for each connection, and some things are awkward in FTP, even if they work.
So instead, TNFS provides a straightforward protocol that can easily be implemented on most 8 bit systems. It's designed to be a bit better than FTP for the purpose of a filesystem, but not as complex as the "big" network filesystem protocols like NFS or SMB. It is also designed to be usable with 'incomplete' TCP/IP stacks (e.g. ones that only support UDP).
For a PC, TNFS can be implemented using something like FUSE (no, not the Spectrum emulator, but the Filesystem In Userspace project). This is at least available for most things Unixy (Linux, OS X, some of the BSDs), and possibly by now for Windows also.
This is not intended to be a proper, secure network file system. If you're storing confidential files on your Speccy, you're barmy :) Encryption, for example, is not supported. However, servers that may be exposed to the internet should be coded in such a way they won't open up the host system to exploits.
So far, the following 8 bit systems have a TNFS client available:
- Sinclair ZX Spectrum (with the Spectranet)
- Atari 8-bit (with the FujiNet)
- Coleco Adam (with the FujiNet)
- Apple 8-bt (with the FujiNet) - in progress at the time of writing
- Commodore 64 (with the FujiNet) - in progress at the time of writing
The TNFS daemon has been built for the following systems. It has few dependencies (which should all be supplied with a basic build environment).
- Linux
- Microsoft Windows
- BSD sytems (tested on OpenBSD)
- Mac OS X and successors
The FujiNet team, for many improvements and enhancements to the basic TNFS daemon. See https://fujinet.online