COMMUNICATION DEVICE SHARING ON A LOCAL AREA NETWORK

摘要

The present invention relates generally to a computer system that allows communications devices (36), such as X.25 cards (36), to be shared by workstations on a local area network (24). Particularly, the present invention relates to a computer system for enabling an application program (12) on a first workstation (10) to access a wide area network communication device (36) residing on a second workstation (26) through a device driver (30) that appears as a file system driver to workstations on the local area network (24). Because the device driver (30) is a file system driver, applications may use standard system calls, rather than device specific calls, to access the device (36).