If I remember correctly, CORBA was all about standardizing APIs. You'd have your distributed "CORBA Objects" whose methods anyone who knew the unique object ID could call. The idea was that there would be a "standard library" for each industry. So all the barbers would implement a standard library "Appointment Schedule" object, all the exchanges would implement a stdlib "Orderbook" object, etc.

CORBA would generate RPC stub objects for you in various OOP languages, and potentially automate discovery, so you could say, give me all an array of all the orderbooks of all the bitcoin exchanges, and ask each for the last price.