<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">I remember packet drivers - lots of data copying going on, gave us a reference point to improve on in years to come.<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">RB<br class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Mar 27, 2019, at 3:15 PM, Karl Auerbach <<a href="mailto:karl@CAVEBEAR.COM" class="">karl@CAVEBEAR.COM</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div class=""><br class="">There was perhaps another stage, one that ran in parallel to the others.<br class=""><br class="">I am thinking of things like the Air Force ULANA (Unified Local Area <br class="">Network Architecture) effort during the mid-to-late 1980's as well as <br class="">the Interop trade show network (which existed separate from the vendor <br class="">stuff at the shows) that had its heyday from about 1987 through the <br class="">early 2000's (it's still going on, but it's not what it once was.)<br class=""><br class=""><a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4794963" class="">https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4794963</a><br class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">https://books.google.com/books?id=4hwEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=ULANA+air+force&source=bl&ots=L26lgcBVRj&sig=ACfU3U1yxuJrO5uyVc9hKSkxn0hQkdJnYQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjPwo6tmaPhAhXFsJ4KHcxwCF8Q6AEwBXoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=ULANA%20air%20force&f=false<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">By-the-way, I worked with the TRW ULANA team (btw, we won, but the award <br class="">was protested.)<br class=""><br class="">ULANA was, at the time, a huge effort to bring commercial off the shelf <br class="">(COTS) material into a cohesive and interoperable set of parts that <br class="">could largely be simply purchased and plugged together (user <br class="">configuration required, of course.) It covered everything from wiring <br class="">to routers to desktop machines to workstations to large mainframes. <br class="">It's scope was both local and long-haul. In other words, everything.<br class=""><br class="">That project put energy into things like the John Romkey's "Packet <br class="">Driver" idea for a universal way to add device drivers to PC-DoS <br class="">machines. John wrote the first packet driver - I think it was for a <br class="">3COM NIC. I did the second for the TRW ethernet card (based on Intel's <br class="">then very flakey NIC chips) we did for the project. And Russ Nelson took <br class="">it further with his Crynwr packet driver collection. (Russ deserves a <br class="">pair of Internet angel wings for his packet driver work.) The result <br class="">was that all of the TCP stack venders for PC's - FTP Software, Beame and <br class="">Whiteside, WRQ, NRC, Netmanage, etc were freed from the burden of <br class="">writing device driver code. That significantly enhanced the spread of <br class="">TCP/IP based PCs in the years before Microsoft squished everything when <br class="">they came out with the built-in stack - but even they used the notion of <br class="">a plug in driver (which they called NDIS).<br class=""><br class="">And ULANA was one of the early customers for companies that were then in <br class="">the literal garage stage, like Cisco.<br class=""><br class="">ULANA also built a fire under the notion that networks needed to be <br class="">monitored and managed - that was the era of ideas like HEMS, CMOT, and <br class="">SNMP. (It was also the era of OSI - which ULANA largely rejected in <br class="">favor of TCP/IP based networking.)<br class=""><br class="">Overall, the ULANA project forced a lot of attention onto the notion of <br class="">TCP/IP interoperability. That notion later was picked up by the first <br class="">decade of Interop trade show networks (and many of us from the ULANA <br class="">project were involved in the design and deployment of the yearly and <br class="">then bi-yearly Interop net.)<br class=""><br class="">(I would also suggest that the metronome effect of the Interop trade <br class="">shows created an intense pressure on vendors to improve products and pay <br class="">serious attention to compatibility with other vendors.)<br class=""><br class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>--karl--<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">_______<br class="">internet-history mailing list<br class="">internet-history@postel.org<br class="">http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history<br class="">Contact list-owner@postel.org for assistance.<br class=""></div></div></blockquote></div><br class=""><div class="">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">—<br class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Richard Bennett<br class=""><a href="http://hightechforum.org" class="">High Tech Forum</a> Founder</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Internet Policy Consultant</div></div></div>
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