This is actually a good idea. There is something in the UNIX world called NFS (network file system). It is based on TCP/IP sockets. I do not know if you know anything about UNIX, but the file system used does not have logical drives (like a: or b: etc), just one huge tree that can span across many harddrives on many computers, thus making them all look like one. NFS helps to connect the other computer's file systems to the network tree. I think it is pretty cool... There is an RFC for it, though I do not remember the number. I read it once cuz I was planning a windows 95 version so I can hook my laptop up to my UNIX computers, but I found software to do it with and was like, why should I kill time on it when I could be using it to make money! It is very complete and designed to be implemented in C. Since Java is so close to C, a port could probably be made fairly easily (provided ya know something about writing file systems/operating systems ;) )