[HECnet] Tops-20 ANONYMOUS FAL Preliminary Testing Results/DAP Query

[Johnny Billquist]

Paul, sorry for mis-spelling your name.

You looked at the DECNET-8 code before. I sent you either links, files, 
or some reference to a machine where you could check it. I can't 
remember now. But anyway, you looked, and figured it was beyond phase I.

   Johnny

On 2019-12-25 02:56, Paul Koning wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Dec 24, 2019, at 11:59 AM, John Forecast <john at forecast.name 
>> <mailto:john at forecast.name>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Dec 23, 2019, at 5:51 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se 
>>> <mailto:bqt at softjar.se>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2019-12-23 20:24, John Forecast wrote:
>>>>> ...
>>>> That was implemented on RTS-8 and looks like a Phase I 
>>>> implementation - all hand-crafted PAL code. The floppies are 
>>>> available on the net and includes full source code. When I joined 
>>>> the DECnet development group in early 1977, there were a couple of 
>>>> PDP-8 developers as part of the group. I don’t know if they were 
>>>> developing a Phase II implementation but they disappeared after 
>>>> about 6 months - not surprising given the difficulties we were 
>>>> having getting it to fit in a 28KW PDP-11.
>>>
>>> Poul took a look at the DECNET-8 sources, and figured it was actually 
>>> not phase I (I thought it was phase I as well). Poul thinks it's 
>>> close to, if not actually phase II. There are things in there that 
>>> apparently did not exist in phase I.
>>>
>> Yes, I agree. I just took a look at the code and the early dates match 
>> when Phase I was available (I was using it around the middle of 1976) 
>> and the later dates (mid-1977) would have been when we were finalizing 
>> the DECnet-RSX Phase II system architecture. The code claims to 
>> support NSP version 2.2 but I have no way to map that to a particular 
>> phase, only that version 1.0 was dated July 1975 and version 3.1 
>> (Phase III) was dated March 1978.
> 
> A while ago I found a Phase I RTS-8 document that describes the protocol 
> in reasonable detail.  It's clear that Phase I has only a vague 
> resemblance to the later protocols.  For example, the NSP protocol is 
> there, but it's seriously different.  For example, it offers both a 
> connection service and a datagram service.  And various other things 
> work entirely differently than the later versions.  So while Phase III 
> and IV can talk to Phase II NSP with no real trouble, there is no way 
> for any of them to make sense out of what a Phase I node is saying.
> 
> If you have source code, it should be pretty obvious if it's Phase I or 
> Phase II from looking at the NSP packet formats.
> 
> paul
> 
> 

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol