It was agreed that the code in both Tierra and Beagle that communicates across the net to other Tierras or Beagles should be modified into an API, so that developers could replace the socket calls with other forms of communication, where appropriate. For example, on the Mac, the sockets between Tierra and Beagle might be replaced by function calls, while on UNIX a local node of Tierra may opt to use named pipes to communicate.