Making distributed systems palatable

Designing and implementing a distributed system is easy compared to the task of convincing people to use it. In a university Computer Science Dept., people generally use UNIX and are not at all interested in moving to a different environment, no matter how wonderful it may be. In this paper we report on how we have implemented a UNIX environment for the Amoeba distributed operating system [1], in order to make the transition from UNIX to Amoeba as simple as possible.