[ih] Resource sharing (was: Re: First file transfer on ARPANET)

[John Klensin]

On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 1:47 PM, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>> National Software Works?
>
>
> NSW was another major attempt.  My impression (which could be wrong) was
> that a) it was far ahead of what the hardware could support at the time, and
> b)  the design needed another iteration.  It took a not-quite-right approach
> to an extreme.  A more naunced design would have been better.  But it was a
> step in the right direction.
>
>>
>> Remote Procedure Call?

> I have never been impressed with this.  First because RPC was always
> synchronous, i.e. blocking.  (To me this is distributed in name only.)
> Computer scientists seem to be afraid of asynchrony. Second, because it
> isn't a *procedure* call at all. At best it has the semantics of a Fortran
> function call, not even a subroutine call, let alone a procedure call.  At
> the time I would tease the RPC zealots (and they were) with either it was
> like co-routines in Cobol or it was an elaborate way to encode one bit
> (request/response).  ;-)

Concur

> (I really detest the way we inflate terminology to make ourselves look
> good.)

Yeah,  My [least] favorite example is in the data management area,
where we once thought there were distinctions among file management
systems, data management systems, data base management systems, and
decision support systems.  Whether "to make ourselves look good" or
because of marketing run wild, we ended up being told that simple
spreadsheets were DSSs.

>...
>>> As far as I know, very little has happened with that area of work
>>> since our efforts,
>>
>> SafeTCL?
>
> Huh?

I don't want to start a religious war, but I did try to say that, IMO,
the thing that was really important about those early resource sharing
activities was that they assumed a highly heterogeneous environment
which the main reason for reaching out to another system was because
it supported specialized services that were not available locally..
That pretty much made them a different sort of critter from assorted
"distributed computing" efforts whose focus was spreading computations
around a more or less homogeneous collection of machines to do
something faster or cheaper than any one of those machines could
perform the task itself.  I would put what little I know of the Irving
Ring efforts, SafeTCL, SETA, various cryptographic hash-breaking and
code-breaking activities, and the various grid efforts into the
"distributed computing" category, but with different design goals from
the "resource sharing in a heterogeneous environment" ideas.  Of
course, that list of distributed computing efforts are different from
each other.: We could make a lot of distinctions here, many of them
actually useful especially if our goal is to push back against the
trend to inflate and conflate terminology enough to make distinctions
impossible.

   john