PARC's environment was a LAN environment, so printing (laser printing!), file storage, mail, and many other services were provided as cloud services by the network. This was in the late 1970s! Because the D machine environments (Smalltalk, InterLisp-D, Cedar/Mesa) were hermitic (you booted a machine with specific microcode for each environment and then the environment ran on the hardware) basically there were three different OSes that needed to support the common services.

So the service implementations were smart: located via what was essentially an anycast and contacted via RPC. Everybody needed a client (for mail or whatever) but the implementations were easier.

The MIT style machines were of course networked and rarely had, say, a local filesystem either, but those services were typically provided by a host (typically a PDP-10): basically a client/server model. The D machine environments just treated the (LAN of course) cloud services and not much different from any other local resource. It was easier to write and run shared services in those days than to use websockets today.

Years later when I first encountered a Sun-3 I was shocked to discover it included an entire copy of sendmail and needed it to get the user's mail of the workstation! What an incredibly primitive approach, worse than I had had access to a decade before.

Of course that crappy model survived, but the apparently dominant model of (say) reading your mail is even more retrograde: gmail is just you logging into a remote computer and running a modern version of elm on it to get your mail. In the late 70s D-machine environments you grabbed an object (e.g. mail message) frm the network, maybe presented it to the user, then used it in a reply, and cast it into the void for someone else to take care of. None of the modern siloing which simply recapitulates the worst part of the PC era.

Woow

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