The document provides an introduction to the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). It outlines the key components of CORBA including distributed computing, the Object Request Broker (ORB) which acts as a communication hub, the Interface Definition Language (IDL) which allows objects to communicate across different programming languages, and the General Inter-ORB Protocol (GIOP) and Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) which define data representation and remote object references over TCP/IP. The document also provides an example of defining a simple "hello world" interface in IDL, implementing and running a client and server application.