[HECnet] TCP/IP experts?

[Clem Cole]

below..


On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 8:12 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

I honestly don't know for sure, but this is the first I've ever heard of that.
Doing a "portable" stack for RSX would probably be very hard, by the way.
Actually doing a portable stack was hard for any OS, but that was idea.   It was written originally in C by Rob Gurweitz and some other ??Bob Walsh maybe?? - I want to say in 1978/79 time frame, using the original Ritchie compiler.    There were a ton of tools developed in the UNIX community to move code at the assembler lever from V6/V7 to RT11 & RSX.   Look at the old Harvard tape that I think Warren has in his archives if you are interested.   I do not remember how it moved the HP's, but there must have been an 3000 or 1000 hack for the Ritchie compiler at HP and/or Berkeley.

As for the BBN portable IP/TCP stack, it is where the famous "mbuf" structure came from.   Rob needed an OS independent memory system for incoming packets.   The BBN IP/TCP was written to call it, and then on a kernel for kernel basis the mbuf system was written for the native OS.

BTW: for UNIX there was no socket call.    It used open and an interesting trick, BBN stole from the MIT Chaos-Net guys.



  
...   you want really bad performance, you want to be close to the kernel,
That was not an goal.    You have to remember that at the time of IP's development, every computer firm had it's own proprietary networking scheme.    DARPA wanted something that worked on all them, so they paid to have it created and implemented.    But it also meant that DARPA needed those implementations of IP/TCP for the system that their primary folks were using - the PDP-10, Multics, UNIX.   In some labs (like US Army's BRL if IIRC), there were realtime systems doing specific tasks.   HP and DEC were the two firms selling those systems.    So BBN needed an implementation of IP that >>worked<< that allowed those systems to connect.

Also remember at the time many of the IMPs are being connected by 9600 baud leased lines - T1s are still not something even DoD would pay to support.    So the original BBN stack was to connected to the system via BBN custom created IMP interfaces (which I think I still have the documentation for in my archives for the Unibus version).


  


     But I really thought one of the targets DARPA had for the stack was
RSX-11.

It would be interesting to find out more.
Low, priority for me, but if I come across some of the old doc / mail messages, I'll try to make said available.    There is an Internet Protocol Implementors guide circa 1978 I think I still have, and I think it might be in there.



  


I do remember VMS was not a target, and thus we wrote the original
implementation at Tektronix in 1979, which we gave to CMU via my
connections and would become the basis for the VMS versions.

Is that the Multinet IP for VMS? Never looked at it, but it's been around for a long time. (And several people here are running it.)

Maybe.    It was known for years as the CMU/Tektronix IP/TCP stack.   Written a combination of BLISS and Macro32.    DEC was also use it as their basis much, much later.    The original version supported the HyperChannel and the original 3COM adapter.    I've forgotten, we might have written the FTP in FORTRAN, I remember we had do some sort of horsing around with FTN.    I have vivid memories at the time being the only BLISS programmer at Tek and teach Stan and a few others why I loved and hated it (I had already been turned to the dark side of C - I missed the BLISS optimizer, but definitely preferred the C tools chain).

When we finished it, some of my friends/former colleagues at CMU/CS asked me for it, we made it available (no stinking GPL, or calling it "open source"   - we just shared it).    They wrote the mail 11 interface and cleaned the whole thing up a great deal.

Clem