The Network Computing System (NCS) was an implementation of the Network Computing Architecture (NCA). It was created at Apollo Computer in the 1980s. It comprised a set of tools for implementing distributed software applications, or

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

. The three principal components of NCS were a runtime environment for remote procedure calls, a network interface definition language (NIDL) compiler, and a location broker service. The location broker differentiated NCS from similar offerings, such as the rival Open Network Computing technology from

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

, by permitting services to be distributed in a dynamic fashion and offering the possibility of "location independence". The design and implementation of

DCE/RPC DCE/RPC, short for "Distributed Computing Environment / Remote Procedure Calls", is the remote procedure call system developed for the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). This system allows programmers to write distributed software as if it ...

, the

remote procedure call In distributed computing, a remote procedure call (RPC) is when a computer program causes a procedure (subroutine) to execute in a different address space (commonly on another computer on a shared computer network), which is written as if it were a ...

mechanism in the Distributed Computing Environment, is based on NCA/NCS. In response to a request for proposals from the Open Software Foundation for distributed computing environments, NCS featured in the DEcorum proposal submitted by Apollo, by then incorporated as a division within

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

, along with

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

, Locus Computing, Transarc,

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

. It also was the first implementation of

universally unique identifier A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit label used to uniquely identify objects in computer systems. The term Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) is also used, mostly in Microsoft systems. When generated according to the standard methods ...

s, these being employed by the location broker to identify objects in the distributed system.

References

Bibliography

* * *Lyons, Tom (1991). ''Network Computing System Tutorial.'' Hewlett-Packard Company, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. *P. Leach et al. (2005).
RFC 4122 — A Universally Unique IDentifier (UUID) URN Namespace
'' Internet Engineering Task Force. Internet Protocol based network software {{compu-lang-stub