We had to build everything ourselves except for the STL like features of RW Tools.h++ and a few other of their libs.
1990s C++ compilers were ... interesting ... - especially for templates.
Have you used SOM as well?
We tried a few things with it. It was a good idea that took too much manual work. Much like CraptiveX/COM but without the toolworks.
I lost everything I had archived in a series of hardware failures and stupidities...
I've repeatedly asked the co-founders to let me have some of the stuff and they still refuse. They didn't think I should have had it to start with.
It really was simple in concept though. Basically a queue server on each machine, memory mapped files and containers/string class/bignum class etc using placement new. The hard part was finding machines that weren't steaming piles of crap. Compaq was the only company we found that had server class machines we could rely on. We also had to stick to IBMs C++ compiler due to all the bugs in Borland and Watcom at the time.