[ih] Fwd: As Flag Day approaches at CMU

[Steve Crocker]

See also RFC 674 by Jon Postel and Jim White, Procedure Call Protocol
Documents Version 2, 12 December 1974.  I believe Jim White had been
pursuing remote procedure calls for a while prior to this date.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc674

Steve




On Sun, Sep 7, 2025 at 8:30 PM 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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