C could be compiled and executed on a wide range of different computers. Allows modular system with multiple file servers, including MS-DOS file service and UNIX file service. N processors can run N processes achieving N-fold improvement over 1 processor. Actual improvement verified with a benchmark. Optimize the grain size of the computations.
System grows as requirements increase.
Smallest distributed system is two workstations and a file server. No single resource is assumed to be in restricted supply. Avoid centralized components, tables and algorithms. Techniques to cope with large scale applications include replicated data and caching. If a machine goes down, some other machine takes over the job.