[scroot]

The thing about DNS and naming is that there were a lot of ideas flying around, some of them in the big standards committees. X.400 and X.500 were the OSI standards for messaging and directory services that were going to handle finding entities using specific attributes rather than with direct names or even straight hierarchical naming (like DNS finally used). It's interesting to read all the old stuff -- I had to sift through much of it a few years back when I wrote my dissertation on the early history of DNS (a cure for insomnia).

I wonder with the Internet now if anything effectively different is even possible, considering that it's no longer a small network but everywhere like the air we breathe.

[shalabhc]

> I wonder with the Internet now if anything effectively different is even possible, considering that it's no longer a small network but everywhere like the air we breathe.

You could slowly bootstrap a new system on the existing one, but you'd need a fleshed out design first :) Everything is replaceable, IMO, even well established conventions and standards, if something compelling comes along.

The CCN ideas are related to naming as well. Maybe the ideas could be extended to handle 'objects' rather than just 'content'.

[scroot]

Hardware architecture is the horizon of my knowledge. But one thing I've always wondered is this: why not just have memory addresses inside a computer map to local IPv6 addresses, then have some other "chip" that can distinguish between non local IP addresses that would, in a perfect object world, point to places in memory on another remote machine?

Obviously there would need to be some kind of virtualization of the memory but hopefully you get the idea. Not exactly related to naming but whatever.

[shalabhc]

Interesting - is the broader idea here that there is a virtual machine that spans multiple physical machines? Instead of virtual 'memory access', why not model this as a virtual 'software internet'?

[scroot]

I don't even think you need a VM, really. Just have this particular computer equipped with some soft-core that handles IP from the outside. The memory mapping, since it's just IPv6, can determine whether you are dealing with information from the outside world (non-localhost ips) or your own system (local ips). Because logically they are already different blocks in memory, they're already isolated.

With something like that you might be able to have "pure objects" floating around the internet. Of course your computer's interpretation of a network object is something it has to realize inside of itself (kind of like the way you interpret the words coming from someone else's mouth in your own head, realizing them internally), but you will always be able to tell that "this object inside my system came from elsewhere" for its whole lifecycle.

Maybe you could even have another soft-core (FPGA like) that deals with brokering these remote objects, so you can communicate changes to an incoming object that you want to send a message to. This is much more like communication between people, I think.

[shalabhc]

> I don't even think you need a VM, really.

I mean a VM as in the idea that you are programming an abstract thing, not a physical thing. Not a VM as in a running program. You could emulate the memory mapper in software first - hardware would be an optimization.

The important point is 'memory mapper' sounds like the semantics would be `write(object_ip, at_this_offset, these_bytes)`, but what you really want IMO is `send(object_ip, this_message)`. That is, the memory is private and the pure message is constructed outside the object.

You still need the mapping system to map the object's unique virtual id to a physical machine, physical object. So having one IP for each of these objects could be one way.

Alan Kay mentioned David Reed's 1978 thesis (http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS-TR-20...) which develops these ideas (still reading). In fact, a lot of 'recently' popular ideas seem to be related to the stuff in that thesis (e.g. 'psuedo-time')