"In the early ’90s, persuading programs on different machines to talk to each other was a nightmare ... (Other early middleware, such as Sun ONC... was tied to

"In the early ’90s, persuading programs on different machines to talk to each other was a nightmare ... (Other early middleware, such as Sun ONC... was tied to C and Unix and not suitable for heterogeneous environments.)" I disagree here. SUN RPCs (ONC) based on XDR worked well and were quite enjoyable to use. CORBA was victim of the Second-system effect. And CORBA meant C++ in the early 90ies. Memory management was a nightmare, C++ and CORBA Apis don't go well together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_RPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_RPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Data_Representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Data_Representation