So, so, w-- uh, could you talk a bit about what led you to focus on that problem at that time?

It just seemed like a really interesting problem.

I always like to work on stuff that looks important So it was clearly something that was coming, and it, it was clearly something we needed, and we really didn't understand how to implement, uh, a system like that.

The view in the systems community at that point was mainly to think about this using locking.

So the idea was you had the users, and they would lock the replicas so that they could have control.

So that way you were gonna make sure that you didn't have concurrency problems.

And to me, that seemed like a very bad solution because that means you have to re-depend on these other users at far-flung sites to do their job, and they might not do it.

So would love to hear a little bit about that story and, and may-maybe relatedly, just perhaps the importance of collaboration outside of academia, whether it's with, you know, kinda government funding agencies or industry and how maybe that's-- if that's been important in your work, how that's been important.

So, so, uh, could you talk a bit about what led you to focus on that problem at that time?

It just seemed like a really interesting problem.

I always like to work on stuff that looks important, so it was clearly something that was coming, and it, it was clearly something we needed, and we really didn't understand how to implement, uh, a system like that.

The view in the systems community at that point was mainly to think about this using locking.

So the idea was you had the users, and they would lock the replicas so that they could have control, so that way you were gonna make sure that you didn't have concurrency problems.

And to me, that seemed like a very bad solution because that means you have to re- depend on these other users at far-flung sites to do their job, and they might not do it.

So I thought, let's switch the work to the replicas.

So would love to hear a little bit about that story and, and may- then maybe relatedly, just perhaps the importance of collaboration outside of academia, whether it's with, you know, kinda government funding agencies or industry and how maybe that's, if that's been important in your work, how that's been important.

So when you saw that problem, you know, what were the early solutions like?

Well, so people were proposing modularity, and they were talking about how important modularity was.

They didn't exactly know what a module was, and so it wasn't like they could give you a rule, "This is a module." It was just a chunk of code.

In fact, there were papers written that talked about how big a module should be and stuff like that, just a chunk of code.

That's not gonna work because you need to design these systems, so you need a way of thinking of a design that sort of fits into this notion of modularity.

They also didn't really know what the rules should be for modularity.

And, um, it turned out that in some of the early work I did after grad school when I was working at MITRE, um, I had already invented a notion of modularity that was sort of more complete than what people had been talking about just because I had a small team of programmers, we were building a complicated system, and I wanted to keep us out of troubleAnd so I had that sort of sitting there when I started to work on this topic.

... wasn't there, that there was also the object-oriented stuff going on on the West Coast.