This paper surveys some of the issues involved in building useful distributed systems involving PC's and hosts. Alternative communications techniques for micro-mainframe communication are compared. The point of view is presented that the PC user should be provided with a unified view of the heterogeneous distributed system to which he is connected. The proposed method is to formalize the notion of a service request and provide distributed services by function shipping service requests to remote nodes able to provide the service, e.g., personal computers will ship requests which they cannot satisfy locally to hosts on the network. Providing a unified view of data which allows PC application programs to access files on mainframes is an example of a service which can be built by intercepting and shipping service requests. Examples from current IBM products are used to illustrate approaches. The views presented are the authors' own, based on systems research in progress at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

An architecture for resource management in a computer system is presented. The architecture is a subset of an APL-like higher level language machine architecture. The approach provides for a natural division of function between software and microcode/hardware. Any object in the system can be managed as a resource, and the fact that an object is managed can be transparent to the program using the object. Finally the resource management concepts are related to the current resource management problems of effective third-party control of resources, intelligent work scheduling, and deadlock resolutions.