[HECnet] Next retro comms project?

[Steve Davidson]

I have a DECnet kit for RT-11.   From what I remember it is HUGE!
It can not make use of I/D space so at one point RT Engineering stopped
development on it.   When I joined the RT group in 1984 I was supposed to
work on DECnet but within a week of me joining they cancelled the project.
I had a hard time understanding why a company that billed itself as a network connected company would ever cancel such a product!   I wound up doing user-mode utilities and SPR's instead.   Yuch!

-Steve



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Bob Armstrong
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 09:55
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: RE: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?

  Well, if we're going to go off into Wishful Thinking Land here :-)

  * 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 :-)

  * DECnet for OS/8.   There was a version started by DEC - it actually ran
under RTS/8, which then also ran OS/8 at the same time as another task.
I've got some partial sources for it, but it's not clear that my sources are
complete or even that DEC ever actually finished it in the first place.   It
never saw the light od day as a customer product.

  * DECnet for RT11.   This is easier at least, because DEC actually sold
such a product, but I don't know if actual kits and documentation for it
still exists.   In either case, I've got PDP-11s and PDP-8s that could be on
HECnet if they had networking software.

  * A repository of software kits and manuals for old hardware.   Yes, I know
there are all sorts of legal issues associated with this, but as a purely
pragmatic issue the main problem with putting up old hardware on the 'net is
finding software kits and manuals to install on it.   A lot of this stuff is
already on the Internet here and there, so maybe we could just keep an
informal directory of pointers to other sites, rather than the actual
software or manual.   Yes, I'm not the first one to suggest this idea, but
it's still a good one.

  * Drivers to implement DECnet over IP tunnels (like Multinet) on other
OSes besides VMS.   I can't see why we'd want to implement our own routing in
the bridge program when DECnet already has perfectly good routing - we'd
just be defeating the DECnet routing in order to replace it with our own.

  Whew!   Usually when I get urges like this I just go lie down until they go
away :-)

Bob