A customer authenticates to the NOS on an existing NOS smart machine. At the customer's disposal is the local machine and the NOS services. The Distributed File System contains the customer's home directory with the customer's preferences. Regardless of which machine the customer authenticates on, the customer's home directory with the customer's customizations are present. The customer can easily find a vast number of network resources. All resources appear local to the customer, but in reality, they are scattered throughout the network. The customer is very happy to find his favorite APL-based calculator still available for a quick matrix inversion. The customer logs off the system when finished.