What's old is new again -- I'm pretty sure QNX could do this in the 1990s.
QNX had a really cool way of doing inter-process communication over the LAN that worked as if it were local. Used it in my first lab job in 2001. You might not find it on the web, though. The API references were all (thick!) dead trees.
Edit: Looks like QNX4 couldn't fork over the LAN. It had a separate "spawn()" call that could operate across nodes.
Any time I see something about remote processes, I immediately think, "Erlang could probably do this."
I think Erlang would have been the programming language of the 21st century... If only the syntax wasn't like line noise and a printer error code had a baby, and raised it to think like Lisp.
Indeed, weird to only find it that low as a sub-comment:
spawn(Node, Module, Function, Args) -> pid()
Returns the process identifier (pid) of a new process started by the application of Module:Function to Args on Node. If Node does not exist, a useless pid is returned. Otherwise works like spawn/3.
QNX had a really cool way of doing inter-process communication over the LAN that worked as if it were local. Used it in my first lab job in 2001. You might not find it on the web, though. The API references were all (thick!) dead trees.
Edit: Looks like QNX4 couldn't fork over the LAN. It had a separate "spawn()" call that could operate across nodes.
https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/qnx_4.25_docs/qnx4/sysar...