[ih] First file transfer on ARPANET

[Miles Fidelman]

Craig Partridge wrote:
>> John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 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.
>
Maybe I'm confused, but I'd consider all of these to be examples of 
distributed computing:
- distributed databases - both SQL and noSQL (can you say map-reduce?)
- federated geodata systems
- some of the "big science" grid systems (e.g, the Large Hadron Collider 
Computing Grid)
- mashups (both client and server side)
- the Erlang/OTP run-time environment

Miles Fidelman





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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra