There is a difference between designing a system where objects always behave similar to network nodes and designing a cludge... I mean, a protocol that allows p

There is a difference between designing a system where objects always behave similar to network nodes and designing a cludge... I mean, a protocol that allows procedures to be called across a network. I'm not saying that message-passing is magic and transparently solves all the problems associated with distributed computing, but conceptually it's different from RPC. In fact, it's kind of the opposite of RPC. Keep in mind that Smalltalk 72 was developed in the same environment (Xerox Park labs) that gave us Ethernet and developed large parts of the conceptual framework underpinning our modern networking.