On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 10:34 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: Right -- ??maybe?? Bob Baron or one of the Mach guys did it - used the DEC Modula-3 IIRC. Exactly - popular with the LISP hackers. I started to implement it in the CMU Distributed Front-End years ago but never finished it - I don't know if it was ever completed. ᐧ

Dan Cross wrote: I don't know if it was first implemented on ITS or Lisp machines, but one of those two. SUPDUP is basically just ITS' internal terminal buffer codes for text and cursor movement, adopted as a network protocol. So certainly the first SUPDUP server would have been written for ITS. Stanford's AI lab also adopted the protocol. But outside those two sites, almost no one. The name comes from "super-duper image mode", shortened to fit ITS' file name limit of six characters. On ITS, a terminal may be opened in "ASCII mode" which means control chacters are interpreted. In "image mode" most control characters are passed through verbatim. There's a special "super-image mode" where *all* characters are passed through. So "super-duper image mode", then, alludes to the fact that even the normally invisible internal codes are passed through.

On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 10:20 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: The original sup was on the 4.4BSD tapes, and was written in C' It may have come from Mach. Yes. FreeBSD didn't offer anoncvs because CVS was so terrible at handling the high rate of change for the FreeBSD project. I don't think any of the other BSD projects ever used it officially, but I have a vague memory of there being unofficial NetBSD and OpenBSD mirrors. The latter two projects focused on using anoncvs, to the present day (though both now have git and other mirrors). DragonFlyBSD used it briefly since it started with CVS and then transitioned to git, when it stopped using it entirely. Yes. The compilers were slow to update, the old ones stopped working due to the compilers heavy knowledge of threads, which were undergoing flux in the base FreeBSD system, so updates were always tricky. Plus there were issues with different upstreams accepting FreeBSD patches for various reasons that I have only a vague recollection of. There were two or three compilers, IIRC: The original DEC one, then an egcs based one and then a gcc one when egcs and gcc "reunited"... This was an unbelievable pain, with few people knowing how to properly do a bringup and John retiring or becoming semi-retired in this time period. Warner

Dan Cross wrote: If there was any RFC734 supdup in BSD, then I'm guessing that would have been a different one written by David Bridgham. The PC/IP one seems to be targeted specifically at MS-DOS, although cross compiled from BSD. Maybe Bridgham was involved in that one too, though. I have asked, and will report back. If Warner was referring to those, then you would be right.

On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 8:33 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: cvsup was written by John Polstra in Modula-3. IT had an optional GUI client. It was notable at the time for using the radical new concept of threading to stream the exchange elements of the protocol, speeding it up radically over the old sup protocol, which was entirely synchronous. In addition, it knew about the structure of RCS files, and exchanged only delta information so could make a number of interesting optimizations in transmission of data and delta data (since RCS had rules for the version number's forms, etc). It was from the very early days of the FreeBSD project (somewhere between FreeBSD 2.0 and 2.1) because the sup protocol was killing the wallnut creek CD-ROM servers with its load (a primary motivation for teaching it about the structure of RCS files). csup was a later rewrite in 'c' as the module-3 compiler fell into disrepair. It was written by Maxime Henrion and is protocol compatible with the cvsup programs. It lacked a gui, but was way more portable and didn't require that a new architecture in FreeBSD first port the Module-3 compiler to it so source updates were possible (only slight exaggeration). cvsup was ported between three or four different Modula-3 compilers as support for the language was fading away.... Both became obsolete when the FreeBSD project moved to svn. It offered not-quite-as-good, but good-enough delta updates, so cvsup and csup became relegated to the dustbin of history. Now that you say that, I recall that as well... Warner