One of my friends is into retrocomputing, and he wondered what happened on MS-DOS if you asked it to access a file on a network share that was bigger than what FAT16 could express.
My friend was under the mistaken impression that when MS-DOS accessed a network resource, it was the sector access that was remoted. Under this model, MS-DOS would still open the boot sector, look for the FAT, parse it, then calculate where the directories were, read them directly from the network hard drive, and write raw data directly to the network hard drive.
Raymond Chen is an international treasure.
Basically the difference between a block and a file based network storage system (eg, iSCSI vs SMB)
Fun to see Raymond’s take on it though
Chen is the gift that keeps on giving!