> On 25 Jun 2022, at 21:16, Anthony Martin <ality@pbrane.org> wrote:
>
> The following papers are a good overview of Datakit and its
> predecessors.
>
> A. Fraser, "Towards a Universal Data Transport System," in IEEE
> Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 1, no. 5, pp.
> 803-816, November 1983, doi: 10.1109/JSAC.1983.1145998.
>
> A. G. Fraser, "Early experiments with asynchronous time division
> networks," in IEEE Network, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 12-26, Jan. 1993,
> doi:10.1109/65.193084.
>
> The latter mentions Plan 9 but only in passing.

Yes, those are great papers - unfortunately behind a paywall.

There is a great 1994 video on Youtube by Sandy Fraser himself that more or less follows the 1993 paper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojRtJ1U6Qzw

As Doug mentioned on this list, Sandy Fraser passed away earlier this month.

In the past years I’ve worked on understanding (early) Datakit and Sandy Fraser and his wife were most kind with assistance looking for papers. I’ve also benefitted from the input of Bill Marshall and of course Doug McIlroy. I’ll share my summary of Research Datakit in a separate post.

Paul

> Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> once said:
>> Probably you will see echoes of this in early Plan9 network code, but I have not studied that.
>
> As someone how has studied Plan 9 extensively, though with no insider
> knowledge, it's definitely noticeable.
>
> "In the aftermath, perhaps the most valuable effect of dealing with
> Datakit was to encourage the generalized and flexible approach to
> networking begun in 8th edition Unix that is carried forward into Plan
> 9." - dmr (2004)
>
> Cheers,
>  Anthony