[HECnet] What DEC created operating systems support the networking protocol used?

[Gregg Levine]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 9:55 AM, Paul Koning<Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:
It would depend on how big "the whole business" is.

I looked in http://elvira.stacken.kth.se/rsts/rsts_80th_birthday.html
for a memory refresh.   DECnet/E appeared in RSTS/E V6C.   That was Phase
II -- no routing, DMC/DMR only.   For 2 or 3 nodes, that was a useable
version.

Phase III (single level routing) appeared in V7.1.   (That was my project
-- first RSTS/E project I worked on if you ignore a week on PIP in the
V6B timeframe.)   That would serve for installations up to about 250
nodes.   DMP/DMV support was added, including multipoint.

Ethernet support and DECnet phase IV (level 1 routing and endnode only,
no area routing) appeared in V9.3.   It took so long because it was hard
to convince management to allow the work in the first place.   There was
a sentiment that Ethernet wasn't interesting for PDP-11s, and/or that no
RSTS system lived in a network bigger than a few dozen nodes (so Phase
IV wasn't needed).   The latter argument may have been valid -- I never
did run into any really large DECnet networks apart from the one inside
DEC.

So anyway... unless you want lots of nodes, or multi-area addressing,
Phase III will serve which means V7.1 or later is ok.   Oh yes, you do
need DDCMP then.   Ethernet or Phase IV require 9.3 or later; async DDCMP
requires 10.0 or later.

           paul
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of Gregg Levine
Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2009 12:10 AM
To: hecnet at update.uu.se
Subject: [HECnet] What DEC created operating systems support the
networking protocol used?

Hello!
I've managed to track down several examples of the RSTS family of
operating systems from DEC. Would any of you have any clew as to which
member specifically spoke the networking protocol that we use here to
communicate within the whole business? These were of course for the
PDP-11.

-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature was once found posting rude
  messages in English in the Moscow subway."


Hello!
That thoroughly answers my questions. Thank you Paul. Incidentally
Johnny the examples came up on a posting to the list for the SIMH
family of emulators, tapes et cetera from the RSTS fan site,
http://www.rsts.org .

On that site the author mentions that the collection would work on
John Wilson's excellent E11 emulator, so I'm not surprised that the
individual there had gotten the whole thing to work on his SIMH
emulation kit, except for some interesting problems.

Of course the next problem is working out the details for creating
this whole business for doing so, I imagine that a commodity router
who's got my current Ethernet network all wired together would not do
that. I would need a Cisco setup for that purpose.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature was once found posting rude
messages in English in the Moscow subway."