> an OS designed after the idea of "the network is your environment, not the computer" where it should make little difference if the resources you are accessing

> an OS designed after the idea of "the network is your environment, not the computer" where it should make little difference if the resources you are accessing is on your computer or not. [..] For some reason (maybe related to costs and licensing), people never adopted the idea... I personally think it's a pipe dream, and the way history worked out seems to confirm that. Truly transparent networking never really worked out anywhere. The better RPC solutions in use, for example, make it very obvious that an RPC is an RPC, instead of looking like a local function call. In file transfer, it has been common to e.g. replace NFS with something HTTP based for quite some time. "Cloud" file systems seem to operate at a much higher layer, preferring external syncing and special high level APIs with only some actual OS support sprinkled in. For Operating Systems, a lot of Mach breaks down when you want to do things fast and securely. It's a testament to APIs better being shaped by locality. Roughly and informally spoken, the closer you are to the actual CPU, the more "lightweight" and "direct" your API can and should be. The further you move away, the more resilient you need to become, and the more control and insight you need to give the caller about the actual transport. To pick two very real extremes as an example: When writing to a register on a local bus, you often just assume it will work. If it doesn't, a panic is sensible (sometimes even worse, like a lockup leading to a watchdog timeout). When trying to invoke a function on another server, obviously that's not acceptable. Then you want to be able to timeout, retry, inspect transport failures, fall back to other servers, configure endpoints, be picky and explicit about payload (and result), and so on and so forth. The immense cruft necessary for the latter case becomes unnecessary and expensive the more local you are. It affects security, and can even pose chicken and egg problems.