[ih] Early Unix networking

[reed at reedmedia.net (Jeremy C. Reed)]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2016, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:

> source code (see http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl). However, in 
> that archive networking appears as a big blob in 4.1c BSD and I am 
> trying to dig beyond that and figure out how the code developed.

I have slowly been authoring a book about this from the Berkeley Unix 
perspective. I started over six years ago and have done interviews with 
over 80 participants in the BSD story.

> => does anybody know of a preserved good copy of the 4.1a distribution 
> tape?

It is included in the CSRG set (disk 1).
https://www.mckusick.com/csrg/
(Now available in some git and subversion repos online too.)
But it doesn't include the sys nor IP networking code, so doesn't help 
much.

Nevertheless the disk1's 4.1c.1 code does have SCCS files for the sys 
networking code from October 1981 and later. See sys/netinet/SCCS/ and 
sys/vaxif/SCCS/s.if_en.c for example. (Again note these SCCS files is 
separate from the disk4 sccs code. I didn't look recently but I recall 
some of this history and some of the files in the SCCS files is 
different from the disk4.)

The SCCS history references ../bbnnet/ code. I thknk the files were just 
renamed, for example ../bbnnet/fsm.h is tcp_fsm.h (which does have SCCS 
history in late October 1981).

So I think using SCCS and renaming files you can reconstruct the 
original VAX implementation from Gurwitz.

The CSRG SCCS archives (disk4) for sys/deprecated/bbnnet/SCCS/ appears 
to be later code but may be a good reference too.

Another awesome resource for you are some of the Combined Quarterly 
Technical Reports from BBN. They discuss what was proposed and what was 
delivered. The ones I used were:
#19 for aug. 1 1980 to Oct. 31, 1980
#20 for nov 1, 1980 to jan 31, 1981
#23 aug 1 - 10/31 1981 (says "At this writing (early December)" 
			and stamped dec. 22 1981)
#24 for nov. 1, 1981 to jan 31,1982
#27 for august 1 - october 31, 1982


$ grep ^@ /home/reed/book//bsd-history/svn-bsd-history/book.bib 
     234
(my list of citations in the book)

$ grep -i CITE: /home/reed/book/bsd-history/svn-bsd-history/*tex | sort -u | wc -l
     233
(my citations left to add to my bibliography, so I have hundreds of 
sources.)