Early RPC & the Alto

Readings

• Bruce J. Nelson, Remote Procedure Call (1981):

You only need to read the thesis summary which starts at page 224 in the PDF. If you have time, however, I'd suggest looking at the rest, particularly the introduction and related work.

• Birrell & Nelson, "Implementing Remote Procedure Calls" (1984)

Compare the perspective of this RPC implementation description with the more design-oriented focus of Nelson's thesis.

• Sun Microsystems, "RPC: Remote Procedure Call Protocol Specification" (1988)

This is an RFC for one of the early UNIX RPC mechanisms, SUNRPC. Note SUNRPC is still used on modern UNIX and Linux systems for services such as NFS.

• Cubera et al., "Unraveling the Web Services Web: An Introduction to SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI" (2002)

This article explains the basics of a modern RPC service, SOAP, along with related technologies.