[ih] Another TCP Reference Implementation

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Mon Apr 22 13:34:57 PDT 2013


    > From: Bob Braden <braden at ISI.EDU>

    > Herewith is my contribution.

Very interesting! One minor observation:

    > First, it was written in IBM assembly language, not in C.

Actually, many of the other early implementations were in assembler.

The one Jim Mathis did for the LSI-11 (under MOS) was definitely entirely in
PDP-11 assembler (MACRO-11, to the precise - it's possible I still have
listings somewhere... :-).

Based on his recent post, this is the one that Jack Haverty ported to Unix at
BBN, too. (I had thought it was in C, but he said otherwise.)

I'm pretty sure the TENEX one was in PDP-10 assembler (I took a quick look
online, and found no definite statement on the subject, but I did find some
pieces that were in PDP-10 assembler, making it likely the whole thing
was). The other possibility is BLISS (I think some of the ELF code for the
first routers may have been in BLISS), but I would doubt that.

The Multics one was in a higher-level language, but PL/I, not C. I think the
Illinois one was the only one (of the very earliest ones) in C.

	Noel



More information about the Internet-history mailing list