My history catching up with me... ;-)

Adrian Florea found a blast from the past for me..   It seems like a world ago when I wrote this paper on the popular distributed computing architectures of the day. 

B. Abrams, "The Distributed Object Dilemma. A Technical Overview of Two Standards for Distributed Computer Systems", Honors Report, Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering, North Carolina State University (1997)

The conclusion was interesting… I was careful not to predict which technology would “win”…   In retrospect, the writing was really on the wall for both of these technologies.  

CORBA and DCE attempt to solve the same types of problems that arise in a distributed computing environment. CORBA was designed to solve these problems in an Object-Oriented way, whereas DCE was designed to be procedural. However, many tools exist to encapsulate DCE in an Object Oriented way. Microsoft seems to be leading the DCE camp with its version of the standard built into Distributed COM (the basis for it much touted ActiveX technology for distributed computing). Sun’s Java and Netscape’s Netscape One, seem to be the big players behind CORBA. These big players are pushing for rapid development within each standard making it very unclear which will come out on top.