[ih] History of the TCP/UDP port space

[David P. Reed]

Noel - Thanks for mentioning additional names.   You are right - my 
vague memory of who did what should not be taken as historically valid.  
I had conversations with these people at the time about the APIs, but I 
was not closely involved in any of those projects, as I said.   I was 
suggesting who I thought were some of the key contributors to follow up 
and find the API documentation - not to grant credit...

My main point, that the network APIs in these and other non-Unix OS's 
were far from the now-current Berkeley Unix Sockets API, is what I was 
trying to get across - these other systems were not at all like Unix in 
many ways, and they already had "mature" APIs to NCP, which were 
retained so that apps could be ported forward easily.  Berkeley 
Sockets's centrality came later.   Though "Sockets" seems to be a 
reference implementation for nearly all stacks today, the interfaces 
were extremely varied in the early days, and the protocol spec avoided 
spec'ing in terms of an API (some think this a bad idea - but since I/O 
APIs were quite different from OS to OS then, it was a pragmatic choice).

Noel Chiappa wrote:

>Slightly off-topic, but before some errors get into the record...
>
>    > From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed at reed.com>
>
>    > I'd suggest that Ken Pogran (who did an early Multics stack with Doug
>    > Wells)
>
>Umm, maybe it was NCP that Ken worked on? By '77, when I arrived, Ken was
>working on the LNI. The Multics stack work when I was there was done by Drew
>Mason (initially), and Dave Clark did a lot of work on it too, before he
>temporarily left for sabbatical at Cambridge. (Not sure who worked on it after
>that, I think it got turned into code supported by the MIT IS people - Jeff
>Schiller would probably remember this better than I.) Doug Wells may have
>worked on it early on, but he left shortly after I arrived in '77, and I seem
>to recall he was working on something else (maybe thinking about TCP for
>PDP-11 Unix, which never happened until much later)?
>
>    > Dave Clark (who did a stack on the Xerox Alto)
>
>That was a port of his BCPL code for Tripos, which he did while at Cambridge.
>(Those were wierd implementations - I'll leave out the details for now.)
>
>    > Dave Moon (who helped with a stack, perhaps along with Stallman,
>    > Knight, and Greenblatt, for the MIT AI Lab's ITS)
>
>I don't think Moon did one, at least not while he was at MIT. (He may have
>worked on one at 'Bolics.) The ITS one was done by Ken Herrenstein. I don't
>know who did the ITS NCP code (perhaps the source says, if anyone really
>cares :-).
>
>    > I suspect even the CADR Lisp Machine
>
>No, the first TCP for any LispM was done at 'Bolics, long after TCP was
>finalized.
>
>	Noel
>
>
>  
>