Mihai Chelaru said:

>This is, I presume, for historical compatibility.  Certain versions of
>Unix, and early network file systems, used paths of the form
>//hostname/path to access `path' on server `hostname'.

I have a Charles River Data Systems box running UNOS, a real-time UNIX
clone that has the usual NFS and friends, as well as running Universenet.

Universenet works like this:

I'm on system "A". I want to copy files from system "B".

cp /../B/home/rmk/somefile .

You can also:

cd /../B/home/rmk

-- 
Rick Kelly  rmk@rmkhome.com  www.rmkhome.com