Or, in the event that a connection was lacking, local state would be maintained only as long as required to allow usable work to get done. Google "coda" or "in

Or, in the event that a connection was lacking, local state would be maintained only as long as required to allow usable work to get done. Google "coda" or "intermezzo" or "andrew file system". You might be surprised how many people worked on these things. I was, and I worked on some of them. Somewhat, but not wholly, tangential: when I read research papers, one of the first things I do is to look at how old their oldest references are. If the references are less than 50 years old, one of two things is usually true (sometimes 0, rarely 2, but usually 1): 1) The field is quite new (e.g. CRISPR-Cfp1 gene editing) 2) The authors don't have experienced mentors to guide them through the enormous literature, particularly in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. It is very rare to see Option 1 in practice. It is incredibly rare for someone of Pike's experience to fall into category 2. This interview is not a research paper; nonetheless, Pike did quite a bit of distributed systems research and is familiar with all of what I mentioned. Networks weren't always ubiquitous or reliable, but the fundamental idea of efficient compute resource sharing has always been attractive enough to view this as a complication rather than a deal-breaker.