[HECnet] Public Services over DECnet

[Dave McGuire]

On 12/30/2017 02:27 AM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
> I come from a mostly-UNIX, mostly-TCP/IP background. I don't understand DECnet well yet, but I want to learn more! Much of my interest in joining HECnet and playing around is because I largely skipped over DECnet in its original airing, and now it seems like a weird foreign land that I feel an irrational need to grok in fullness.
> 
> What are/were the conventions for providing public services over DECnet Phase IV networks, to remote users without their own local user accounts? I.e., let's say that I had a node on a large DECnet-only network back in the before time, and I wanted to share a file repository in a manner comparable to anonymous FTP on a TCP/IP network. How would I have done that? Were there conventions for doing that sort of thing back then, or was that a foreign concept on large DECnet networks at the time?
> 
> Were there any examples of BBS-like servers living on DECnet networks? Online multi-player games such as MUDs? Early DECnet-based examples of "log into the coffee pot to see if the brew is fresh"? DECnet-based analogs to Archie for discovering stuff? DECnet-based USENET-like communities?
> 
> I don't know if any of these concepts even made sense in the DECnet world at the time. In addition to only understanding the networks of the 80s from a UNIX-centric, TCP/IP-centric worldview, I'm also having a hard time un-thinking the newer concepts I'm used to after so many years of steeping in a broth of HTTP and social media. I have somewhat conflicting urges to both learn how to think like a 1980s DECnet user, and to retcon modern concepts into an alternate reality where TCP/IP never took off.

  It sounds like your life has been similar to mine. :)  Though I cut my
teeth on PDP-8 and PDP-11 systems, I had never used DECnet, because I
never had the hardware...DEUNAs were WAY out of reach financially when I
was a teenager in the 1980s; I was lucky enough to have a PDP-11 at the
time so I'm not complaining.  After living and breathing RSX and RSTS
for a long time, I got into UNIX in the mid-80s, and have been there
ever since except for a stint of several years as a commercial VMS
admin.  I've still never used Windows, and at this point I doubt I ever
will.

  When I worked as a VMS admin, it was in a gov't related organization
where no networking of any kind was permitted, so no DECnet there
either!  I must've been one of the only VMS guys around who had never
used DECnet.

  Your post obviously tickled a bunch of "wow, this guy's a lot like
me!" receptors. ;)  The only thing that I can say in direct response to
your questions is this: Are you aware that the X window system can, or
at least could, use DECnet as a transport?

               -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA