DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING INVOLVING PERSONAL COMPUTERS AND MAINFRAME HOSTS.

This paper surveys some of the issues involved in building useful distributed systems involving PC's and hosts. Alternative communications techniques for micro-mainframe communication are compared. The point of view is presented that the PC USer should be provided with a unified view of the heterogeneous distributed system to which he is connected. The proposed method is to formalize the notion of a service request and provide distributed services by function shipping service requests to remote nodes able to provide the service, e. g. , personal computers will ship requests which they cannot satisfy locally to hosts on the network. Providing a unified view of data which allows PC application programs to access files on mainframes is an example of a service which can be built by intercepting and shipping service requests. Examples from current IBM products are used to illustrate approaches.