Tandem Expand (Was: Re: Distributed VSTa)

I don't know how familiar you all are with Tandem Computers. They are
interesting beasts. I work as a System Analyst actually at Tandem (now a
division of Compaq, but that's another story).

A couple of things of interest in the tandem environment:
First, there the fact that disks are named processes. So are tapes and
TCPIP stacks. (Note: Tandem has a structured files system of this form:
\<node>.$<volume>.<subvolume>.<file>).

This has the interesting side effect that you could (in theory) write
virtual disk processes. There is an example of a virtual tape process
floating around. True, the system is monolithic in design, but little
bits of modularity like this are really interesting.

The second thing I wanted to mention (and this is the really interesting
bit) is Tandem expand. Exampnd is **very** cool, IMO. Basically, you can
"SYSTEM" (aka 'cd') over to another system. In fact you can access other
node's files with normal commands!

Example to copy a file:
FUP DUP \PRUNE.$SYSTEM.SYS33.TACL, \TESS.$SYSTEM.TEMPOR.TACL
(equivilent to 'cp \prune.$system.sys33.tacl \tess.$system.tempor.tacl',
where TACL is the file name, sys33 and tempor are subvols, and $system is
a volume (or disk). \prune and \tess are different nodes).

Even better, I can "SYSTEM (aka 'cd') to another system and *run a command
on that system*! This (for some reason) seems like a very VSTa like
ability, don't you agree?

I have a qustion. Should we have some sort of VSTa name service? I mean,
a lot of the problems involved in using purely symbolic names for things
is getting a consistant and expectable result every time.

Oh well, this was just wierd thoughts.....

Ciao!

--
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