It's called "service discovery" (ca. 1996)

It’s called “service discovery” (ca. 1996)

Kills me when I see stuff like this.

Google Cloud Print Reveals the Future of Printing

To print out a document, you rely on your local operating system, which must have a driver installed for the printer you intend to use. Most of the time, it’s not an issue; at home, you probably have one printer and all of your PCs have the required drivers.

Things get a bit more complicated when you want to print something from a mobile device, like an iPad, or from a laptop based on Google’s Chrome OS, which relies entirely on web apps and services. This is whyGoogle is working on Google Cloud Print, a service that enables “any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.”

I talked about this in 1996. Explained why the then-prevalent mechanism for making distributed systems (RPC) had an extremely limited lifetime. Nobody believed me. I decided to work on computer architecture instead.

[Update: forgot to mention — the example in the original paper is a print service, for crying out loud.]