[ih] History of Naming on The Internet - is it still relevant?

[touch at strayalpha.com]

> On Aug 14, 2025, at 2:49 PM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 4:15 PM Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
> 
>> Whew, you are opening up a Pandora's box.
>> 
>> I, personally, am not fond of the socket API.  But I'm lazy and don't
>> want to re-invent a wheel that is almost round, or at least round-enough
>> to be useful.
>> 
>> I do remember a presentation in which someone at a SIGCOMM gathering
>> advocated certain network operations modeled more as virtual memory
>> paging operations.  Sequence of results was not as important as knowing
>> that a certain remote access to a block had been completed.  It was an
>> intriguing idea and it was *neither* a socket-like form of access nor a
>> file-like form of access.  My memory has a vague tingling that there was
>> something like this in Multics.
>> 
> 
> Dave Farber's distributed DCS system at UC Irvine effectively wrote into
> the memory of the receiving computer.

Gary Delp implemented a variant called Memnet over token ring and Ron Minnich ported the idea to Sun computers over Ethernet called MEther; both treated the memory of a set of computers as a single address space and hid the rest over the network.

Both circa late 1980s.

Joe