[ih] NCP, TCP/IP question

Steve Crocker steve at shinkuro.com
Tue Mar 10 02:16:04 PDT 2020


Lars,

Thanks.  For anyone who hasn't tracked PDP-10 operating systems, I believe
TOPS-20 and Tenex were the same.  Tenex was developed at BBN.  DEC provided
the TOPS-10 operating system but it was less capable than Tenex.  DEC
acquired the rights to Tenex and brought it out as TOPS-20.  I don't know
if there are substantive changes in the process; I have the impression
there weren't.

These systems were connected to the Arpanet when NCP was the host level
protocol.  I didn't follow their history through the transition to TCP/IP,
but I have the impression they continued to be commonplace on the Internet
and thus would have had TCP/IP implementations.  Others can fill in the
gaps here better than I can.

Steve


On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 5:08 AM Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:

> Steve Crocker wrote:
> > I don't think C was used or available on Tenex, but I'm not the most
> > authoritative source.
>
> There were several PDP-10 C compilers, but I'm not sure whether one
> actually ran on Tenex.  Some ran on TOPS-20, so it wouldn't have been a
> big leap.
>



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