[ih] Early Unix networking

[jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Paul Ruizendaa

    > Here is where I am at, working backwards from 4.1c BSD.

Anything Berkeley is pretty late in the game, in terms of early TCP/IP on
Unix.


    > DTI Unix (March '79). ... I have questions outstanding off list to
    > understand what this was.

John Day can I think answer questions about this; if memory serves, I think he
did it?

I remember looking at this code (and saying bad things about it an at early
Internet/TCP-IP working group meeting), but it was so long ago I can barely
remember anything about it.

    > BBN Unix / Haverty (September '77 - March '79). ... the TCP/IP stack is
    > written in [PDP-11] assembly.

That's because it's a port of Jim Mathis' MOS-based code. (Which I _might_
have a copy of, somewhere. I definitely do have the MOS source - that was the
OS the C Gateway, later the Proteon router products, was based on.)


We looked at both of these at MIT, but wound up doing our own; I no longer
have any memory of why (probably mostly NIH, but I suspect we also wanted
something pretty high performance [since our networks were high-speed LANs,
not ARPANET], and probably also wanted to explore some of our own ideas on how
to structure network code - this was around the time Dave Clark was doing
upcalls, etc.

I have a couple of dump tapes that should have all the MIT Unix TCP/IP source
on it (and perhaps more besides, e.g. the MOS TCP/IP that Jack ported), but
I've had trouble getting them read - unreadable spots on the first tape we
tried.

    Noel