He did have access to dedicated single-user machines like that; in fact he built some of them himself with Bart Locanthi a couple of years before. But he had no idea what to do with them, so he programmed them to act as multiwindow terminals for a remote Unix system, running a window system over a serial line. I know that sounds like a joke but it sounds like it was kind of cool — I'd love to play with a Blit (oh hmm, they've released the firmware and an emulator in 9front and 8th Edition Research Unix) — but it also sounds like a real waste of a 68000 to me.

I think the thing he was saying about FTP was when the only copy of a file he wanted was on somebody else's local disk. It sounds like he was doing more stuff with Dorados pretending to be Altos than was normal at the time, and, yes, trying to get them to act like batch-mode programming environments.

(Didn't Cedar's FS support having local files too? Obviously I've never used Cedar, just read papers about it.)