[ih] Early sockets discussion paper

[Craig Partridge]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 9:44 AM, Joe Touch <touch at strayalpha.com> wrote:

> Not sure if it helps, but a history of port numbers as used in Internet
> sockets (including NCP) appears in RFC7605. I've always wondered about
> the chicken-and-egg issue of BSD sockets vs. the interface defined in
> the early TCP specs.
>
> Does anyone happen to know whether TCP v1, v2, or the split TCP/IP v3
> variants that preceded the current v4 had the same interface spec and
> the direction of influence (TCP to BSD or the converse)?
>
>
Hi Joe:

I'm going to do this from memory (always perilous when looking back 30+
years), but here's my recollection.

The earlier BBN TCPs used a file system abstraction -- you opened /dev/tcp
(or something like that -- it was
in /dev -- may have been /dev/inet/tcp or similar) and then used ioctls to
set the socket parameters such as port
numbers and whether the port was listening for connections.  I do not
remember what the corresponding abstraction
to accept() was for forking off new connections.

The idea of dividing the port space into reserved and non-reserved ports
(e.g. ports below 1024) was a Berkeley
innovation.

Craig



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