[ih] Early Unix networking

Jeremy C. Reed reed at reedmedia.net
Tue Oct 11 12:59:35 PDT 2016


On Tue, 11 Oct 2016, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:

> > Sometime in 1985, I ended up helping Bob Walsh a little bit in the 
> > 4.2 BBN TCP/IP code release, which was the BBN code rewritten to use 
> > the socket interface rather /dev/tcp.
> 
> That throws my understanding of 4.1a upside down. My understanding was 
> that 4.1a already had the BBN TCP/IP code combined with the (early) 
> sockets API and that this happened between January and March 1982. If 
> that shift only happened in 1985 (according to the above snap shot 
> before October 14th) it means that the sockets API and the /dev/tcp 
> API (the API pioneered by Network Unix) coexisted for about 4 years.

You may have read this backwards. This is not developing the BSD 
release.

> I guess I really need to find the 4.1a tape and work with the code in 
> detail to improve my understanding of what was there early in 1982.

That would be nice. But you basically already know basically what was in 
it (per your other comments and sources that I didn't include here).

Some early uses of the sockets in the BSD code:
% if_en Ethernet interface driver 81/11/26 wnj 
% if_acc ACC LH/DH ARPAnet IMP interface driver  82/02/01  sam
% if_un Ungermann-Bass network/DR11-W interface driver  82/02/05  root
% sendmail daemon.c     82/02/26  eric (allman)
 (also look at the 4.1a_daemon.c and compare with the bbn_daemon.c code)
% telnet.c      82/02/28 root
% telnetd.c     82/02/28 root Stripped-down telnet server.
% comsat.c      82/03/31 root "datagram version"

The BBN Combined Quarterly Technical Report No. 24 mentions some of BSD 
changes they knew about but not implemented on BBN's side.

Some other interesting documents for you to look at are:

TCP/IP Digest  8 Oct 1981   Volume 1 : Issue 1

TCP/IP Digest  11 Nov 1981  Volume 1 : Issue 6

TCP-IP Digest, Vol 1 #9

By the way, I couldn't find BBN Quarterly Technical Reports 
18, 21, 22, 25, 28.  Does anyone have these?



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