After working with Distributed COM, I'd go as far as to say that people building DCOM software were doing microservices, way before that term was known or popular - microservices at much finer granularity (per object), and all the bells&whistles people make startups off today - like load balancing, service discovery, strong auth, etc. - were already built into the platform and properly integrated.

Alas, it was ahead of its time; the legacy of C makes it hard to work with.