What TACOMA taught us

Tacoma is a system for supporting processes so called agents whose ex ecution moves from processor to processor Our rst prototype was com pleted in March the version documented elsewhere in this volume was up and running the following year There have since been four major sys tem releases The current versions of Tacoma provide support for agents written in C C ML Perl Python Scheme and Visual Basic They run on most avors of UNIX the Win API including Windows Windows NT and Windows CE platforms and the Palm Pilot from US Robotics Our practice has been to build and discard prototypes we try to learn from what worked and what didn t