Creating "symbiotic" applications between Macs and the Apple Network Server

[ClassicHasClass]

The Apple Network Server's implementation of AIX had a secret weapon, and that was a full Unix-side implementation of AppleTalk, Apple events and the Program-to-Program Communications Toolbox (PPC Toolbox). Apple published demonstration applications where Mac clients could offload their computations to an ANS, which received tasks and sent back completed data via Apple events. This demo shows how to create such an application that can grab the front page of Hacker News via a JSON API, a task that would be much slower on a 68K Mac (and that's if it can do TLS 1.3 at all): the ANS actually pushes it updates which it can display asynchronously. The server is in C and Perl; the client is CodeWarrior Pro 2 using PowerPlant.

Plus, there's a lot of history involved in why the ANS ran AIX ...

The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC Toolbox)

Most of my systems are microcomputers (and commensurately sized), though I do have some moderately larger beasts: you've met homer , my 1987...

oldvcr.blogspot.com

 

[MrImprovement]

It's a pretty cool article ... I liked the concept of distributed computing... too bad it didn't catch on.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Hey, thanks. It was fun to write. Wish I'd known more about it back in the day when it was newer.