[ih] As Flag Day approaches at CMU

[John Day]

The Dave Walden reference is also RFC 61.

For FWIW, one might cite the debate between RPC and IPC that occurred in the late 80s.
Tanenbaum, A. “A Critique of the Remote Procedure Call Paradigm”
https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/Publications/Papers/euteco-1988.pdf

John

> On Sep 7, 2025, at 20:30, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> It's basicalled a 'remote system call' protocol (perhaps
>> the first ever).
> 
> I looked at Bruce Nelson's thesis on RPC (a.k.a. Xerox PARC CSL-81-9) to investigate that. He cites this paper:
> 
> [22] Jerome A. Feldman and Robert F. Sproull. System support for the Stanford hand-eye system. In Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 183-89. IJCAI, London, September, 1971.
> Sproull and Feldman talk about extensions to Sail and TopslO which allowed them to do IPC via message procedures. While not really RPC in the true sense, their scheme did allow a remote call to have apparently normal syntax.
> 
> and this:
> 
> [92] David C. Walden. A system for interprocess communication in a resource-sharing computer network. Communications of the ACM 15(4):221-30, April, 1972.
> One of the earliest descriptions of an IPC facility. Walden's pioneering scheme was an extension of the Arpanet's Initial Connection Protocol.
> 
> So it seems that the question of remote calls was very much in the wind at the beginning of the 1970s.
> 
> Nelson also cited RFC 674 (dated 1974) which mentions "procedures for obtaining access to groups of remote procedures and data stores" at SRI.
> 
> He also cited RFC 722 (dated 1976), which in turn cited:
> 
> [4] Haverty, Jack, RRP, A Process Communication Protocol for
> Request-reply Disciplines, NWG RFC 723, NIC 36807, (to
> be issued)
> 
> But RFC 723 is listed as "Not issued." Jack, you've left a 49-year technical debt :-).
> 
> Finally, Nelson reminded me that by the late 1970s, the equivalence between message passing and procedure calls was *the* major talking point in distributed systems architecture. It seems obvious that when there's a network in the way, only message passing is available (even if it's disguised as RPC). He cited:
> 
> [52] Hugh C. Lauer and Roger M. Needham. On the duality of operating system structures. Operating Systems Review 13(2):3-19, April, 1979. Under some loose assumptions, messages and procedures are shown to have the same power for operating system communication. The authors claim that the choice between these primitives should be based on considerations of the programming environment.
> 
> Overall I think Bruce Nelson's thesis is the inescapable reference for this topic.
> 
> Regards/Ngā mihi
>   Brian Carpenter
> 
> On 08-Sep-25 11:11, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote:
>>     > From: Guy Almes
>>     > So this was a real networked file system (and not just lots of FTP)?
>> Yes; the protocol was not, I think, documented in an RFC or anything;
>> although an ITS halp file:
>>   https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/sysdoc/mldev.protoc
>> described it. It's basicalled a 'remote system call' protocol (perhaps
>> the first ever).
>>     > From: Jack Haverty
>>     > IIRC, it took advantage of an interprocess communication capability
>>     > called the "JOB/BOJ device", which enabled one program to open a
>>     > JOB device, and another program to open the corresponding BOJ (JOB
>>     > reversed) device, and send whatever they liked back and forth. But
>>     > I don't remember details.
>> Interesting that you don't - because you co-wrote the JOB/BOJ spec!
>>   The JOB/BOJ Device:  A Mechanism for Implementing Non-standard Devices
>>   Marc S. Seriff, Jack Haverty, Richard Stallman
>>   September 18, 1974
>>   https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/blob/master/files/sysdoc/jobonl.100
>> 	Noel
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