[ih] History of Network Virtual Terminal (NVT)

[Bernie Cosell]

On 22 Jan 2010 at 11:21, John Day wrote:

> I may be wrong, but I thought the NVT idea first 
> showed up in the "new" Telnet in mid-72.  I had 
> always thought it originated with Alex MacKenzie, 
> but he swears it wasn't him.

I think that that was the result of the meeting I referred to when I 
mentioned DDWW in the previous message: Dave W and I were the 
representatives of BBN's TIP group at that meeting [although at that time 
I was pretty much "the guy" working on the TIP code and so I was mostly 
worrying about the telnet considerations from our side of BBN [as opposed 
to the TENEX side] and I don't remember who, if anyone, was at the 
meeting from the BBN TENEX group].

Ralph Alter and Will Crowther had started on support for the 2741 [half 
duplex line-at-a-time selectric based IBM terminal], although I don't 
know why [obviously ARPA told us to do it, but I don't know why and I 
just had the chore of making it all work...:o)] and I guess a general 
concern arose at that meeting for being able to talk to sites like 
MULTICS and [I think] some IBM-based sites that weren't so hot with full-
duplex, straight ASCII terminals.  [I was a cross-point for that because 
I was trying to get the 2741 to work at least plausibly with TENEX and so 
I ran into every sort of terminal-compatibility problem you could imagine 
[e.g., the 2741 locked its keyboard after you hit 'enter' so you couldn't 
[easily] input two lines at at time].

The details all fade, but I'd bet it was at that meeting where the idea 
of the NVT was hammered out.  Same meeting I presented my scheme for 
doing negotiations [DDWW] and all that got documented in the RFC you 
mentioned. After that there were several RFCs with new "options" defined 
[the first I can remember was RCTE: remote-controlled-transmission-and-
echoing, proposed by the folks in Hawaii, I think]

  /Bernie\

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Bernie Cosell                     Fantasy Farm Fibers
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