1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for sharing computer data among computers.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One of the areas of computer technology that has evolved rapidly is sharing computer data among computers. Technology exits, for example, to allow a computer to remotely mount a diskette drive, a diskette drive image in memory, or a CDROM drive to a server. This technology works well if the files to be shared are files of the same media type as the remotely mounted drive. This technology works reasonably well for mounting drives, but there is presently no useful way of installing a single file, directory, or folder remotely. Moreover, there is presently no useful way of installing a file or directory remotely when the file or directory is of a type different from the remote drive on which it is to be mounted.