That's something you can do with firewire as well. Just share the volume.

That's funny.

Doing that amongst my collection of Windows, MacOS, MacOS X, Solaris, Linux, and OpenBSD machines would require immense amounts of work, as I would have to deal with SMB, AppleTalk, and NFS, at least. Or pay, likely, large amounts of money to buy products for the Windows and MacOS machines to make them understand protocols that have existed as standard in other OSes for fifteen years.

Not to mention that it would require that the computer remain up while I work with that device. In the case of the Unix OSes, that's not a problem, but Windows wants to reboot every fifteen minutes and MacOS likes to crash. In many cases, I'd prefer a solution that did not depend on other computers.

Which is not to say that that's always the case. Firewire is great for many, even most, such applications, but that doesn't mean that it will ever be computer-independent, like an Ethernet connection would be.