23 May
2017
23 May
'17
6:36 a.m.
On 23 May 2017, at 1:25 , Clem Cole wrote:
As for DataKit et al.. Greg Chesson was a grad
student at UoI. The UoI folks did the original V6 Arpanet for UNIX code and Greg was the
one of the primary developers same. What I do not remember is who came first, the Rand
networking work for the UoI work. Rand did the the ports (later called named pipes) and
a few other things pretty early. But again all those dates sort of mix together in the
early middle 70s. USENIX was not yet publishing proceedings so it's hard to keep
straight. It pretty much just email and memories of those of us that were sharing things
at the time.
These dates I can fill in:
- UoI Arpanet Unix was initially done between December 1974 and March 1975, building on
the experience gained with the earlier ANTS I and II projects.
- Rand ports were done in 1977, under contract to the air force (report dated June
'77).
Anyway, when Greg graduated, he was hired by Ken when
he finished and developed DataKit at Bell labs. One of the pieces of datakit that was
released as part of V7 was Greg's mpx(2) code - which was the multiplexer.
Interesting. I always thought that mpx files were driven by the work on the Blit terminal,
the link to networking is new to me.
I'm looking into the history of Spider and early Datakit. Sandy Fraser was kind
enough to send me the 1974 report on Spider and it already mentions actual usage for
remote printing, remote login and a central 'file store'. Spider was an
interesting bit of technology, essentially it linked a dozen or so computers over a
1.5Mb/s shared link (a daisy chained twisted pair cable) to a central router/switch. There
was only ever one Spider router, but the design allowed for multiple routers to be
connected over T1 long distance lines.
Does anybody know of surviving v5/v6/v7 code for Spider networking (e.g. the
'tiu' device driver, the 'nfs' file transfer package, etc.)?