[HECnet] Old protocols in new ones

[Paul Koning]

> On Mar 27, 2021, at 3:06 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> ...
> Right. Smart controllers with DDCMP in firmware on the controller itself was definitely not the first implementation.
> 
> But I don't have the full history of DDCMP as such. But it sounds reasonable that the original DECnet could have been using DDCMP already. But was that the first implementation of DDCMP? You mentioned V3.0, which would imply that there were even older versions since before DECnet.
> Did ANF-10 use DDCMP?

I know of another non-DECnet protocol that used DDCMP: the Typeset-11 cluster communication.  By the time I got there (1978) it used DMC-11s.  It also was the first implementation I saw of distance vector routing, predating the one in DECnet phase 3.

Typeset-11 only did file transfer; it treated short control files as messages when that was needed, dropping those into a directory to be used as queue elements for a queue manager application.  For example, those files might contain articles for the newspaper, or individual advertisements for the classified section.  As I recall, Joe Mauro was the primary designer of the protocol.

	paul