[HECnet] DECnet et al

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2011-07-17 21.16, Peter Lothberg wrote:
ANF10!
DISCO DUCK
DISCO FEVER
ANF10 is a fond memory... Do I remember right that it was based on PDP-8
machines acting as connection points? Did they talk serial lines between
each other?
=A0 =A0 =A0 =A0Johnny

The PDP8 thing is a DN92, it has a sync interface and a bunch of
terminal lines and a lineprinter interface. It was supposed to talk to
a DS10, sync interface on PDP10 IO bus.

ANF10 is talked by the TOPS10 hosts over DTE (to FE PDP11 on KL), DL10
(DEC10 DMA/IObus to Unibus) and NIA-Ethernet (we got a ether_type for
it..)

There is ANF10 code for PDP11 that run on 40's or 34's.

Ah. I thought the DN92 was somehow related to ANF10.
Did ever anything but TOPS-10 support ANF10?
(Whatever code ran on the FE RSX system don't count... :) )

The PDP11 code can talk DDCMP over ASYNC or SYNC interfaces, DQ11,
DMR11, DMC11. So you can do Wan things. In Sweden we had DEC10's in
Stockholm and Linkoping networked with a 9.6K sync link.

The DEC2020 talks DDCP with a DUP11 and a KMC (I think it was KMC,
unibus card with microdode that basically did DDCMP.)

Yeah, I seem to remember that the KMC was the card with DDCMP on board.

Anf-10 has link-state routing like OSPF/ISIS but only one area.

I was very ignorant at the time I played with this stuff. Exactly what could you do over ANF10? I remember connecting between machines (interactive terminal sessions), but were there file transfer protocols, or network based filesystems? Other features?

Hello!
If that's the case, then how would these machines communicate over
longer distances? For that matter, before Ethernet, and even the
current methods of fast connections we have now, would all of you
believe that we did use either dial-up on leased lines?

Mentioned in Cliff Stoll's book, "Cuckoo's Egg" is how his university
was connected to the Internet.

It depends on what timeframe, the IMP's had 9.6K and later 56K links
between them. There was a pararell and a serial host interface
named 1822, and later (some bozo) did X.25 as access host-imp.

So they either had a IMP at the University, or a 1822 serial link to
an IMP.

-Dept of useless knowledge.. -P

...and Peter don't need to "believe", since he was there and involved... :-)

I remember sitting at the Royal Institute of Technology in the beginning of the 80s, and connecting to MIT to run ITS on their machines. That involved an IMP, if I remember right. And it worked fine, although the speed was probably not impressive by todays standards. But back then you were used to 300 bps modems anyway, so this was no worse.

	Johnny