From: Lars Brinkhoff
PARC's MAXC appears in the mid-1970s.
Maybe this is a good time to ask if anyone knows whether any of those
diverse systems has software preserved? Specifically, the
implementation of the NCP and 1822 Host-to-IMP protocols?
Both MAXC's were PDP-10 re-implementations, and ran TENEX. So the basic
system is still around, not sure if they had any interesting local hacks
(well, probably PUP support; MIT tried to put it in MIT-XX, so it may
still exist on thats backup tapes).
I am pretty sure that the NCP implementation for the MAXCs was the TENEX version, with local mods by Ed Taft.
I designed the Alto BBN-1822 interface, which was used for connecting to the Bay Area Packet Radio network and also used for PARC-MAXC2. MAXC1 had a Nova as the front end, about which I know nothing, but MAXC2 used an Alto. Both machines were 40 bit word microcoded machines programmed to be PDP-10s. Corporate wanted PARC to use SDS but the CSL folks wanted a 10, so they had to build one.
The software specifically for the Alto 1822 survives, oddly enough, because Marc Verdiell (CuriousMarc)’s
I only tested my own code up to successful loopback to the local IMP, then Ed took over. I did the low level code for the PRNet interface, which was not NCP, and hooked it up to Hal Murray’s Mesa implmentation of the Pup stack.
-Larry