[HECnet] DECnet Phase-III anywhere?

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Feb 7, 2013, at 10:10 AM, Bob Armstrong wrote:

That would mean at least RSX-11M V3 (or M+ V2), 

I found an SPD (no software kits, sadly!) for DECnet-11M Phase III and
RSX-11M v3.2, but it's dated 1984.   That's later then I would have expected
- I could have sworn that Phase IV was out by then.   Actually by the fall of
84 I was working at DEC and I'm sure we had Phase IV on VMS by then.   Do you
know when Phase III first shipped?

The different operating systems got their DECnet upgrades at different times.   For example, RSTS got Phase III around 1981 (that was my first job in RSTS development).   Phase IV took a very long time because of some benighted notion around DEC management that Phase IV was a "big system" thing and therefore could not be considered for lowly PDP11s.   

As I recall, RT lagged even more, it stuck with Phase II longer than most.   Or maybe I'm confused with another unloved OS, like one of the 36 bit ones.   Then again, I remember DECnet/10 doing Phase IV support rather early.

Phase IV development started not long after Ethernet appeared, though early on there was something (on paper only) that looked much more like what ended up being Phase V.   The "long header format" in Ethernet packets for Phase IV is a vestige of that.   The actual Phase IV originally was called IIIe (extended) and was concocted by Paul Beck and myself in an attempt to make something that wasn't so hard.   Looking up node addresses to get MAC addresses was considered too hard by DECnet/VMS developers at that time.

	paul