[HECnet] Next retro comms project?

[Johnny Billquist]

Brian Hechinger wrote:
  * DECnet for BSD, especially 2.11 PDP-11 bsd.   Yes, a 16 bit version is
significantly harder than a 32 bit version, I know, but there are several
real PDP11s out there running BSD that could be on HECnet.   I know - I've
got one!   We could use the Linux DECnet as a starting point - the dn
userspace utility programs might not even be that hard to port - but we'd
need a kernel wizard to do the tricky bits :-)
I know just the guy.   If you are serious about this, please let me know and
I'll see if he's interested in helping out.   I think the last time I talked
to him he mentioned about lacking an ethernet controller for his PDP-11.
Anyway, he's a professor for the university I work at.   PhD in Neurology of
all things, but he's one hell of a programmer.   He wrote kernel patches for
BSD 2.11 (i think, it might have been 2.09) for the PDP-11/73 CPU which it
seems had a bug in it that DEC had patched all their OSes to work around.
Smart cat.   Don't know how interested he'd be though.   I can always ask.

As usual, it's all about time. I've done a number of patches and small fixes in the kernel of 2.11BSD myself. It's not that magic.

But it requires time, and first of all, you need to have a fairly good understanding of DECnet, which will take some reading, and talking with people. Then you can start thinking about how the API should look like. The concepts in DECnet are slightly different than TCP/IP for instance, so you cannot have an API that looks like the TCP/IP one here, but need to do something else. I suspect it might be a good idea to look how the interface in Ultrix looks like, and try to model it after that.

	Johnny