[ih] First file transfer on ARPANET

[Craig Partridge]

> John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
> > Our biggest problem was that our vision quickly outstripped the 
> > capability of the computers of the day.  (NLS was a very good example 
> > of working beyond the ragged edge)  Our model was that the Net should 
> > be a virtual OS that we could just use.  Too bad those ideas were 
> > abandoned and we haven't moved very far in the last 35 years.
> > 
> > It really is too bad that the Internet ended up being more like DOS 
> > than a real OS.
> 
> My impression in the few years after I got on the net at the beginning
> of 1990 was that distributed computing using the net as you describe
> was out there and slowly progressing, and that stuff started dying or
> getting blocked in the mid to late 90s due to security problems as the
> net got bigger and more public and everyone started reflexively
> turning off their RPC services and similar things.  How does that
> correlate to the impressions of people who'd seen the 80s on the net?

My impression (I started in 1983) is that distributed computing was
an idea that for a brief period worked -- the time required for long
distance communication roughly was in sync with processor times, from
about the late 1970s until the early 1990s.  That's when we saw distributed
file systems flourish and experiments with distributed shared memory.

Then the speed of light constrained us.  The cloud (namely clustering a
bunch of machines very close and limiting our exchange to the start
and end of the computation) is an interesting approach to circumventing that
problem.

Thanks!

Craig