🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct5.173444.24966@meaddata.com>, srivasm@meaddata.com (M. C. Srivas) writes:
|> In article <DWF.92Oct5092154@hope.acl.lanl.gov>, dwf@acl.lanl.gov (David W. Forslund) writes:

|> millions of machines and many millions of users. What do you have in
|> mind when you say:
|> 
|> 	"I believe the workstation world now is moving more to
|> 	peer-peer computing in a truly distributed manner."
|> 
|> I find that very hard to believe.
|> 
|> -Srivas.
|> 

 Whoa....It all points to the paradigm you are using. If I set out a bunch of PC's,
and mount file systems from a UNIX host, this is C/S. But if I set up a SUN
workstation to point to another workstations' printer, use xntpd to keep my clock in 
sync with someone else, this is peer to peer computing. Now, if my sun is a 
server for those PC's, we have a mixture of both C/S and peer to peer, but in a
distributed manner. 

 Perhaps it should be looked at from the point of locality (or independence
thereof). I no longer need to "login" to another machine to get access to some
of its facilities (like a news server), and I may also provide a service to 
that machine. Peer to peer implies that I do not rely on another system to 
run, and that I may obtain services from many other systems. X-Stations are C/S
from the X-Stations user, but may be peer to peer from an outside service provider,
since each X station looks like a single machine (i.e. I don't know that 
the user on 'foo' is working from the console or an X-Station).

I agree with the sentiment stated above. We are moving to distributed computing
in a peer-to-peer paradigm for the traditional UNIX workstation. As far as souped
up PC's go, they are evolving towards this, but are still stuck in the more
traditional C/S paradigms.

jon

-- 
Jon Alperin
Bell Communications Research

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* All opinions and stupid questions are my own *