[ih] TCP adoption in 1984

[Bill Nowicki]

Yes indeed, I arrived at Stanford in September 1979, and the Computer Science department was just starting to move into Margaret Jacks Hall, named for the heir to "Monterey Jack" cheese, in newly renovated corner of the original quad. Up until then, the CS Department did not have a computer. If you wanted to research systems, you still had to do a dissertation in theory, AI, or numerical analysis. SAIL also moved down from the hill into the basement of Jacks hall. My office was on the fourth floor, where the Altos went. There was some planning done before then perhaps, maybe as early as 1978, especially arm twisting from Xerox to let us have them (even though PARC land was leased from the university). One justification was that Altos were already being replaced the "D" machines like the Dorado, much better performance but expensive, and the Dandelion, more reasonable cost with newer technology. All the Xerox gear including the file server (literally an Alto with disks) and the laser printer (one second per page, amazing performance!), also controlled by an Alto, used the 2.97 megabit per second experimental Ethernet exclusively. The original Sun Multibus card that Andy Bechtolscheim designed was also the experimental Ethernet, as well as the BSD Vaxes and the LSI-11 gateway running Noel Chiappa's code obtained by Jeff Mogul.
By 1984, however, all the Sun Microsystems products used the standard DEC Intel Xerox (DIX) Ethernet using ARP.
Bill    On Monday, May 4, 2026 at 07:36:35 AM PDT, Adam Sampson via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
writes:

> Xerox gave a large donation of Altos and associated gear (most notably
> 'Dover' laser printers) to MIT, Stanford and CMU; these all used only the 3MB
> Ethernet. (I have been looking online for an original document which says
> when this happened, but I can't find one. Some sources say it happened in
> 1978 , but it might have dribbled over into early 1979.)

It looks like late 1979 for SAIL. From Les Earnest's files:

> SYSTEM MEETING                    7 March 1979
> ...
> Xerox:    Xerox is offering the Computer Science Department a Dover
>         (high speed, high resolution XGP-like printer), an Ethernet,
>         and some number of Altos - LES.
 
> SYSTEM MEETING                    11 July 1979
> ...
> Dover:    Should arrive Sept.-Oct.  Comes with 16-18 Altos & file server.
 
> SYSTEM MEETING                    6 September 1979
> ...
> Dover:    Due Oct.

https://www.saildart.org/SYSTEM.MTG[D,LES]52
(There are quite a few other references to the Dover, Altos and Ethernet
under LES, so it's probably worth a grep through there...)

-- 
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>                        <http://offog.org/>
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