[HECnet] DDCMP over asynchronous emulated lines on simh 4.0

[Clem Cole]

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 11:29 PM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
For example the campus network on (where else?) UC Berkeley was
Ethernet all over,

Ah youth!!!    Before ethernet, the PDP-11's and Vaxen were connected over 9600 baud seiral lines on the "BerkNet" (which has severally  derogatory other names).   In fact the original Arpanet Honeywell IMP connection was the Ingres 11/70 in Cory Hall (later DoD an BBN C30 based IMP in Evan Hall).    At was all UNIX boxes running 2BSD PDP-11's and 3 then 4.1BSD on he Vax  in those days.

To  physically  send and e-mail to the Internet, you  used the BerkNet which forwarded it to the Ingress system (hosts were named A/B/C).   Eric Alman wrote sendmail because he got tried of hacking Eric Schmidt's (yes Google's old CEO) and Kurt Shoen's "delivermail" program, during the mail header format wars.   Eric A. being a DB guy wrote a database production language to rewrite mail headers.

As I side note,I remember helping  Bob Kriddle, Asa Romberger and few others - pull the original  stinger tap style UCB ethernet cable from Cory to Evan Hall.   Berkeley was actually a bit later than CMU and MIT on running ethernet.    The original UCB Ethernet cable replaced the BerkNet serial link.    It was running the >>BBN<< version TCP/IP for the BSD 4.1 and was a connection between the Ingres Lab and the CAD lab (my guys) in Cory then into the CSRG machine room in Evans.    A year or so later, Joy would create 4.1A/B/C and finally 4.2BSD some time even later starting the sockets transition.    I've forgotten which boards we used.    I want to say, that my memory is that we  must have had a couple of the 3Meg boards from Xerox like we had had at CMU before, but since 3COM was already birthed, it may have been 3COM boards.    I say this because I have memory of working with Kriddle with the funky Xerox tap (which was mechanically sometimes not great).    The Xerox taps were in plan grey metal box, where as the 3Com taps were "potted" in plastic or some such material.

Clem