Yes, I'd thought of Sun's Jini here, part of their Java push -- which IIRC exposed network (un)reliability and tried to address it through service lookup and limited-lifetime lease/renew for remote resource access.

Though I'm not sure it went anywhere?

(or how TUHS-relevant this is/was... apologies if not)

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Hmm, apparently Jini became Apache River; last release in 2016, then retired Feb 2022:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini

On Wed, 29 Jun 2022, 05:36 Richard Salz, <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

> My theory is that networking is different because it breaks all the time.

This Sun research paper from 1994 https://scholar.harvard.edu/waldo/publications/note-distributed-computing is a classic.