Table of Contents

1. Motivations, objectives and characterization of distributed systems.- 2. Distributed system architecture model.- 3. Interprocess communication layer: Introduction.- 4. Hardware interconnection technology.- 5. Link level.- 6. Hierarchy.- 7. IPC interface and end-to-end (transport) protocol design issues.- 8. Distributed control.- 9. Identifiers (naming) in distributed systems.- 10. Protection.- 11. Atomic transactions.- 12. Synchronization.- 13. Multiple copy update.- 14. Applications and protocols.- 15. Error recovery.- 16. Hardware issues.- 17: Hardware/software relationships in distributed computer systems.- 18. The national software works (NSW).- 19: Ethernet, pup and violet.- 20. Conclusion.- References.