[ih] Packet Radio Software

[Barbara Denny]

 Hi
Thanks for the ien78 reference! It brings back memories, especially looking at the pictures. I will take a more detailed look soon. 
BTW, in doing some quick wikipedia lookups regarding packet radio I noticed what may be a mistake.  I have heard of the EPR, VPR, IPR, and the LPR as names for the different Packet Radio hardware.  A Wikipedia entry for prnet mentioned a UPR.  I have never heard of it before. Anyone out there know about this one?  Given that same article doesn't mention the VPR  I wonder if an error got propagated somehow. 
barbara 
    On Tuesday, September 8, 2020, 09:29:38 AM PDT, Lawrence Stewart via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 I was peripherally involved in the PRNet activities in the Bay Area and went to a few quarterly meetings at SRI.  (I built an 1822 interface for the Alto and we used it to encapsulate PUP packets for transit over PRNet, linking two Xerox sites in Palo Alto*)

The radios and radio software was built by Rockwell (nee Collins Radio) and my youthful read on the vibes at meetings was that the SRI/Arpa people did not think much of the software development practices.  One story I heard was that Rockwell management insisted on very tight control of the top secret source code.  This meant that the master copy was to be kept on punch cards in the manager’s office.

So it seems unlikely to me that the radios would be reloading their software from neighbors, at least until after other folks were able to make modifications.

* http://www.watersprings.org/pub/rfc/ien/ien78.pdf <http://www.watersprings.org/pub/rfc/ien/ien78.pdf>

-L

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