The fact I even got into this is Joe Armstrong's fault. I was listening to his talk about programming multicores and thought "you know I'm on-board with the actor model across the network, but what's the point of having multiple actors on one machine?" Which lead me down the async rabbithole, which through io_uring ends up reminding me of actors!

I may be too far into the BEAM, but it's definitely the case that a modern computer is a distributed system at so many levels.

The Network is the Computer. :)

Is apparently (re)trademarked...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-network-is-the-computer/

Yep.

I still have some of the Sun manuals with that sentence.

It is kind of ironic how many decades we have been doing distributed systems, and now everyone talks about microservices as if rediscovered powder.

yeah. but remrmber that the BEAM is more than just a message queue, its stuff like monitors and links, which are not part of the actor model and confers benefits like why you dont typically have to manually close a file in the beam, or how you can write to a (non-raw) file over the network transparently