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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 15-Aug-25 09:59, touch--- via Internet-history wrote:
>> 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.

iirc, the original Apollo Domain network mapped memory across their proprietary LAN. Their CPUs were all Motorola 68000s which had a full Memory Managament Unit, so all the Apollo workstations on the LAN shared the *same* virtual memory address space. They had a proprietary o/s originally called Aegis, which I think had a Unix-like shell. A Design Principles document from 1989 [1] claims:

"Network-wide access to file system objects through virtual memory management"

This started early. Wikipedia says 1981 [2]. A whole bunch were installed at CERN, and I remember that several of us tried to buy shares when they went IPO. Later they started supporting Ethernet and IBM Token Ring, and were taken over by HP in 1989.

[1] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/014962A00_Domain_OS_Design_Principles_Jan89.pdf (157 pages!)

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Computer

    Brian

> 
> Joe
>