Global naming without global trust

In this 1987 lecture, Butler W. Lampson discusses naming in general and in distributed systems in particular. He explain why maintaining consistency in the name space is a different problem than maintaining in the data space. This has profound implications for the design and implemtntation of distributed system.

In 1987 the Word Wide Web had not been invented and it was impossible to phantom billion of users. Nevertheless Lampson's discussion on scale and it's implications is correct even seen with contemporaty usage patterns.