UNIX has been around now for almost 20 years. At the time UNIX began, most departments felt themselves well-endowed indeed if they owned a single PDP-11/45 with 256K memory and a 2.5M RK05 disk. Nowadays a laptop would be embarrassed to have only that. It is our hypothesis that UNIX is no longer the appropriate kind of operating system for the 1990s. In this paper, a new system, Amoeba, will be described, that we believe meets the requirements for distributed computing in the 1990s
