2 Jun
2020
2 Jun
'20
8:19 p.m.
At around that point in time (I don't have the
very _earliest_ code, to get an exact date, but the oldest traces I see [in mapalloc(),
below] are from September '78), the CSR group at MIT-LCS (which were the people in
LCS doing networking) was doing a lot with asynchronous I/O (when you're working
below the reliable stream level, you can't just do a blocking 'read' for a
packet; it pretty much has to be asynchronous). I was working in Unix V6 - we were
building an experimental 1Mbit/second ring - and there was work in Multics as well.
I don't think the wider Unix community heard
about the Unix work, but our group regularly filed updates on our work for the
'Internet Monthly Reports', which was distributed to the whole TCP/IP
experimental community. If you can find an archive of early issues (I'm too lazy to
go look for one), we should be in there (although our report will alsocover the Multics
TCP/IP work, and maybe some other stuff too).
Sounds very interesting!
Looked around a bit, but I did not find a source for the “Internet Monthly Reports” for
the late 70’s (rfc-editor.org/museum/ has them for the 1990’s).
In the 1970’s era, it seems that NCP Unix went in another direction, using newly built
message and event facilities to prevent blocking. This is described in "CAC Technical
Memorandum No. 84, Illinois Inter-Process Communication Facility for Unix.” - but that
document appears lost as well.
Ah, well, topics for another day.