[ih] NCP, TCP/IP question

Tue Mar 10 15:01:11 PDT 2020

It was a slightly confusing time in the early 80s with the DEC machine situation. The virtual machine design was initiated by BBN and their paging box that brought the Tenex operating system into existence in the early 70s. That was on KA machines. Then DEC brought out the KI machine with similar but not identical features in the mid 70s. Then DEC brought out the KL machines In the late 70s. Tenex was ported to those machines by non DEC people.  Somewhere DEC got wise and bought the rights to something and came out with Tops20, a very decent clone of Tenex with a superior file system. Meanwhile TCP/IP was floating about and needing to be ported to all those systems so those of us who had responsibilities to DARPA had to keep source licenses to Tops20 so we could keep developing TCP/IP because it was inside the OS. Everyone played nice. Charlie Lynn was the BBN guy who had inherited it on their side. He was young and bright. I was in charge of the machines at ISI in Marina del Rey, then the largest node on the Arpanet. I had a collection of 6  DEC machines of various vintages and a team of systems programmers to keep the humming and changing almost every day in the final months before Flag Day of New Year’s Day, 1983. Plus we were feeding all the fixes to DEC to help them keep their commercial products up to date. All the while delivering services to 3,000 online customers around the world and a hundred researchers in the building including Jon Postel, Danny Cohen and Paul Mockapetris who were my go to brain trust on a daily basis. It was an exciting time. 

Dan

Cell 650-776-7313

> On Mar 10, 2020, at 12:24 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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