(Heavily Used) Distributed Systems that Influenced Me

 I had my first job, as a VMS sysadmin, and did my master's degree at USC, during the heyday of distributed operating systems research and implementation. Here are a few of the ones that influenced me:

• VAXclusters: My pal Wook, a former DEC employee himself, was rather disparaging of VAXclusters and the VMS operating system in general, but the distributed file system, distributed block-level access to network-attached disk drives mediated by a distributed lock manager, the ability to share a single set of accounts across the cluster, and especially the distributed processing queue for batch jobs became my expectations for what a system should be. Why did a good distributed batch system never become a standard feature of a UNIX house? (You should should definitely read Nancy Kronenberg's paper on VAXclusters.)
• NFS: Of course, one of the two indispensable tools of a CS research organization in the late 1980s was a Network File System (NFS) server; you could access it from almost any flavor of UNIX and many non-UNIX OSes. Naturally, this built on Sun RPC (remote procedure call), which among other things included mechanisms for marshaling data types for exchange across the network between different kinds of CPUs and OSes, though RPC itself as a concept was older.
• X Windows (from Project Athena): The other indispensable tool. Of course we first used workstation GUIs on Suns, MicroVAXen, Macs and Amigas, and then later Microsoft Windows, but the most important innovation of the mid-1980s was arguably X Windows, which allowed a program with a GUI to run a program with heavy computational, memory or I/O requirements on a remote server with the mouse, keyboard and graphics all on the desktop. Yeah, it was hard to configure and get working, and architecturally the split of functionality between the desktop and the server might not have been right, but this set the standard, pretty literally.
  I had forgotten how big Project Athena itself actually was; IBM and DEC contributed several thousand machines, from PC-class to large minicomputers and servers, and about ten staff to MIT.
  The other big thing to come out of Athena, of course, was Kerberos. Both X Windows and Kerberos are still in use today.

Those were the ones that permeated the local atmosphere at USC/ISI, where I worked 1986-1992, then again 1995-1997. There were probably other systems that I was using at the time that I have forgotten were radical or influential; to us, this was just the ocean we swam in, unaware of the water except when something broke. (My first job, as a sysadmin primarily responsible for the VAXen but with secondary responsibility for pretty much everything else, was to fix things when they broke; that was often enough to keep a pretty good sized group of us busy full time.)

I'll do a separate post on some of the distributed OS research systems and papers that influenced me. There are a bunch of those, too...