Distributed Computing Environment

In computing, the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) software system developed in the early 1990s from the work of the Open Software Foundation (OSF), a consortium (founded in 1988) that included Apollo Computer (part of Hewlett-Packard from 1989), IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, and others. The DCE supplies a framework and a toolkit for developing client/server applications. The framework includes:

DCE represented a big step in the direction of standardisation of architectures, which had previously been manufacturer-dependent. Like the OSI model, DCE has not seen much success in practical implementation; however, its underlying concepts have had more substantial influence over subsequent efforts.

Open Software Foundation (OSF) came about to a large degree as part of the Unix wars of the 1980s. After Sun Microsystems and AT&T Corporation worked together to produce UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) and refused to commit to fair and open licensing of Unix source code, many of the other Unix vendors felt their own market opportunities were unduly disadvantaged. The Distributed Computing Environment is a component of the OSF offerings, along with Motif, OSF/1 and the Distributed Management Environment (DME).

As part of the formation of OSF, various members contributed many of their ongoing research projects as well as their commercial products. For example, HP/Apollo contributed its Network Computing Environment (NCS) and CMA Threads products. Siemens Nixdorf contributed its X.500 server and ASN/1 compiler tools. At the time, network computing was quite popular, and many of the companies involved were working on similar RPC-based systems. By integrating security, RPC and other distributed services on a single "official" distributed computing environment, OSF could offer a major advantage over SVR4, allowing any DCE-supporting system (namely OSF/1) to interoperate in a larger network.

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