Implement a Remote Fork facility

[R.H. coast near the top]

In article <17819 at glacier.STANFORD.EDU> jbn at glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle) writes:
>
>      It's been done.  See "The LOCUS Distributed System Architecture",
>by Popek and Walker, MIT Press, 1985.  ISBN 0-262-16102-8
>LOCUS is a distributed UNIX kernel developed at UCLA.  It's 4.2BSD
>compatible, yet allows full distribution over a network of heterogeneous
>machines. [...] Very impressive.  Not clear why it never caught on.

Well, the early versions were pretyy s-l-o-o-o-w at doing the
niftier things, but I think a lot of that got fixed. However
I understand that quite a number of companies entered into
licensing negotiations with Locus, including at least one which
bet the - software - future of the company on being able to get
hold of Locus and use it to compete with Apollo and Sun. Unbeknownst
to these hopefuls, IBM had funded the Locus startup, and eventually
decided to exercise their option to an exclusive license, thus causing
Locus to pull the plug on all of the other suitors. A number of the
elements of Locus are now beginning to trickle out in the form of
AIX features.

-- 
Geoff Arnold, Sun Microsystems Inc.   +------------------------------------+ 
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