A ``real'' software environment for parallel machines must offer many other services besides the parallel language to meet expectations of users of conventional (super)computers. Operating services for SIMD machines are provided by the UNIX host and MIMD machines have also used this ``host-node'' mechanism until recently. The IBM SP-2, from the start, adopted a different strategy with full UNIX available democratically on each node. This allows the machine to either be viewed as a highly coupled parallel or as a distributed system. These are still important software issues remaining in the integration of these two faces of parallelism. However, this appears to be the way of the future, and naturally links COWS, metacomputing, and MPPs.