[ih] NCP, TCP/IP question

[Craig Partridge]

I got to know Charlie after 1983.  My recollection was that he worked on
TCP implementations in the 1970s.  I cannot remember the platforms.

Craig

On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 1:24 PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>  I don't think anyone has mentioned Charlie Lynn yet.  My memory might be
> faulty but I think he was working on TCP in the early 80s, perhaps even
> earlier. I don't know if he was bug fixing someone else's implementation
> but I am pretty sure he reported on TCP during our BBN packet radio status
> meetings.  Charlie worked on many Internet projects but unfortunately died
> fairly young.  Perhaps Jil Westcott can verify or fill in here since she
> was managing the packet radio project at BBN at this time.
> barbara
>
>     On Tuesday, March 10, 2020, 05:31:54 AM PDT, Nelson H. F. Beebe via
> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>  Vint Cerf asks about early implementation languages for TCP/IP.
>
> I searched our remaining archives of what in the 1980s and 1990s was
> science.utah.edu, a DECsystem 20/40 (later upgraded to a 20/60)
> running TOPS-20, and found TCP/IP network code written in PDP-10
> assembly languages with these names:
>
>     tcpbbn.mac  tcpcrc.mac  tcpjfn.mac  tcptcp.mac
>
> The files in that directory carry time stamps from 1984.10.25 to
> 1985.09.11.
>
> The tcpbbn.mac file has this comment:
>
>     ;COPYRIGHT  (C)  DIGITAL  EQUIPMENT  CORPORATION  1976, 1985.
>
>     This module implements the BBN TCP JSYS interface.
>     This  code  was originally developed at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN)
>     under contract to  the  Defense  Advanced  Research  Projects  Agency
>     (DARPA).
>
> The JSYS instruction is the PDP-10 system call.
>
> I also found a memo, design.mem, with the header
>
>           Black Arts
>               of
>     Transmission Control Protocol
>         Inter Network Protocol
>         Implementation
>             in the
>         VAX / VMS Environment
>
>           July 1982
>
>         Stan C. Smith
>           Tektronix, Inc.
>     Computer Resource Dept 50-454
>         P.O. box 500
>       Beaverton, Oregon  97077
>
> that describes the VAX/VMS TCP/IP code written in Bliss, a systems
> programming language that was developed at CMU for DEC, and used by a
> few sites with DEC development contracts.  Otherwise, it was a
> licensed software product that was too expensive for us to have on our
> PDP-10, PDP-11, and VAX systems.
>
> Instead, we wrote such code in assembly language, and later, in Pascal
> (TOPS-20 compiler from Chuck Hedrick's team at Rutgers), C (PCC
> compiler ported to TOPS-20 by the late Jay Lepreau, and later KCC,
> written by Kok Chen at Stanford and significantly extended for systems
> programming work by Ken Harrenstien at SRI International), and PCL
> (Programmable Command Language, a DEC compiler available only on
> TOPS-20). Once C became available on the PDP-10 and VAX, it was
> clearly the language of choice for software tools, and assembly code
> was a dead end with the growth in minicomputer and microprocessor
> architectures.
>
> For scientific work, all of our coding was in Fortran, and SFTRAN3 (a
> structured Fortran developed at JPL in Pasadena, and machine
> translated to standard Fortran 66 and 77), with only low-level
> primitives for character and bit processing, and system calls, written
> in assembly code.
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> - Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254
>     -
> - University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148
>     -
> - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail:
> beebe at math.utah.edu  -
> - 155 S 1400 E RM 233                      beebe at acm.org
> beebe at computer.org -
> - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL:
> http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
>
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