[ih] Early Unix networking
Noel Chiappa
jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Mon Oct 10 08:26:34 PDT 2016
> From: Paul Ruizendaa
> Here is where I am at, working backwards from 4.1c BSD.
Anything Berkeley is pretty late in the game, in terms of early TCP/IP on
Unix.
> DTI Unix (March '79). ... I have questions outstanding off list to
> understand what this was.
John Day can I think answer questions about this; if memory serves, I think he
did it?
I remember looking at this code (and saying bad things about it an at early
Internet/TCP-IP working group meeting), but it was so long ago I can barely
remember anything about it.
> BBN Unix / Haverty (September '77 - March '79). ... the TCP/IP stack is
> written in [PDP-11] assembly.
That's because it's a port of Jim Mathis' MOS-based code. (Which I _might_
have a copy of, somewhere. I definitely do have the MOS source - that was the
OS the C Gateway, later the Proteon router products, was based on.)
We looked at both of these at MIT, but wound up doing our own; I no longer
have any memory of why (probably mostly NIH, but I suspect we also wanted
something pretty high performance [since our networks were high-speed LANs,
not ARPANET], and probably also wanted to explore some of our own ideas on how
to structure network code - this was around the time Dave Clark was doing
upcalls, etc.
I have a couple of dump tapes that should have all the MIT Unix TCP/IP source
on it (and perhaps more besides, e.g. the MOS TCP/IP that Jack ported), but
I've had trouble getting them read - unreadable spots on the first tape we
tried.
Noel
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