[HECnet] Re: Hecnet addition

[gerry77 at mail.com]

On Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:04:57 +0200, you wrote:

Definitely. So, why did you pick area numbers that were already used in 
HEcnet? :-)

We started as a group of people with some DEC hardware, not ever thinking that
some day we would have a working DECnet. Many systems hadn't DECnet loaded and
others had addresses like 1.1, 1.2, and so on just to play with some local
link. Johnny bridge didn't existed and we didn't knew anything about Multinet.

When we first heard about HECnet it was running with some homemade hardware
and there was Magica online! :-) We were not able to do that and stopped.

Some years later we tested Multinet and TCPware tunnels, but our ADSL (and
ISDN) dynamic IP address links proved to be very troublesome. we hadn't enough
bandwith to create a central site for a star topology network and mesh
networks with Multinet were not feasible, so we stopped again. Anyway, with
Multinet we started to (very) loosely coordinate addresses among us.

Years later (autumn 2006) we started for the third time to think about a true
DECnet and we tried again either Multinet tunnels or DECnet Plus, and finally
discovered that HECnet had grown and there was Johnny's bridge available...

The addressing scheme was enforced but not changed and we ended with the
actual setup. Once we thought about changing our area number from 1 to 39
(because +39 is the international dialling prefix for Italy), but we didn't
need such a change so it's still only an almost forgotten idea. :-)

G.