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Java RMI, which had the misguided goal of making objects (the whole world was fully in the grip of OO religion) appear the same, regardless of whether they were local or remote to you.

I was going to mention RMI, but couldn't recall the TLA. Does anyone else remember LANS and Windows NetDDE? That got end user machines involved in "distributed" computations.

COM+ also had distributed transactions. I was fortunate not to work with it too much.

Was this in the protocol? I thought that was around the same time as DTCC which is pretty good IMO.

I believe COM+ came along and subsumed DTCC, but I'm not sure.

Sun ONC RPC - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_Computing_Remote_...

I played a tiny part in debugging early XML-RPC implementations. XML-RPC had most of the efficiency and representational flexibility of JSON today. Then SOAP came barreling in. Software is full of heartbreaks :/

PVM (a.k.a. Parallel Virtual Machine) perhaps? Predates CORBA by several years