[ih] What is the origin of the root account?

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Fri Apr 12 07:29:50 PDT 2013


    > From: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org>

    > I wrote, debugged, and made functional the first implementation of TCP
    > for Unix

I'd have to check, but my memory also says the one from Illinois may have
been earlier. (Not that it matters much!)

    > The TCP was written in Macro-11

Really? Wow, I thought it was in C! That goes to show you you memories can be
unreliable. I remember coming over to BBN to talk to you about it (I can
vaguely recollect the meeting - I think we were in a machine room), and I
think we even got a copy of your code, but we never did anything with it.

    > It was used in the first "TCP Bakeoff", battling with other
    > implementations

This was definitely at ISI (I remember being there over the weekend, doing it
- the lights in the hallways were out, IIRC), and I _think_ (from looking at a
list of meetings) that it was the Jan 25-29, 1979 meetings.

    > There must be some old IEN that documented that.

IEN-77. It lists the implementations tested together:

- Wingfield, Unix "C" (this must have been the Illinois one?)
- Havery, Unix Macro
- Braden, IBM
- Plummer, TENEX
- Clark, Multics
- Mathis, LSI-11

	Noel



More information about the Internet-history mailing list