[ih] Dave Farber's DCS

[Steve Crocker]

I knew a little about DCS, but not enough to answer your question.

Historical note:  I finally finished my PhD In late 1977 after a stint at DARPA and three years at ISI.  I wanted to do a little teaching on the side.  UCI said fine but asked if I would cover the distributed architecture course in addition to what I had mind.  They had a problem because Farber had just left for Delaware, taking my brother with him.  I taught the course and also recruited a couple of students to come to ISI.  Paul Mockapetris was one of them...

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 22, 2020, at 7:48 PM, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> When I was at SDC during the 1970's I met Frank Heinrich (who eventually became my Best Man at my wedding.)  Frank was a student of Dave Farber on the Distributed Computing System (DCS) at UC Irvine during the late 1960's.
> 
> DCS used distributed services (via a ring network) to build the chunks of an operating system.  It used a bid-and-contract system to bind the pieces together - if you needed file storage you put out a bid for storage and machines that had that facility would send back a response, with a cost.  Then there was a contracting phase to bind the relationship.
> 
> (IBM had to concede to DCS that IBM did not invent the token ring network concept.)
> 
> Frank H. taught Dave Kaufman and me about DCS.  That had a lot of influence on some of the things we were working on under wraps of government secrecy.  Dave K. and I were fascinated with the idea of extending capability-system like protection domains, with privilege delegation, across the net to create encapsulated DCS-like network services.  (This was before one of our consultants, Whit Diffie, did his public-key cryptography stuff.)
> 
> I don't think that DCS had much of a practical impact on the net.  That is, not until the last decade or so.
> 
> That concept kinda went dormant for a long time.  But it came back with the rise of HTTP/S based web APIs, such as in Amazon's AWS and many of Google's APIs to things like graphing tools and such.
> 
> It has also come back with people using Docker containers as services that are created and scattered around the net as needed, often with DNS or a higher-level naming service used to locate and bind them.
> 
> Is there a description of DCS that is better then the inadequate snippets and fragments that one finds occasionally?
> 
> (BTW, I did a multi-hour interview with Dave Farber some years ago and a sizeable part was about DCS.)
> 
>    --karl--
> -- 
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history