Unix was on the ARPAnet circa 1975 (if not earlier): http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc681

V6 was "released" in May 1975, and that document was also published in May 1975 and says that the software had been running for about a month, so it's entirely possible that the ARPAnet Unix work was done before V6 (or perhaps they were an early test site: I don't know what the policies were around that).  It's been many years since I've read RFC681 closely and from my quick skim just now, I don't think they say what version of Unix they're running.  It's clear from the RFC that they had been running Unix for more than a month given the description of their site, and if I had to hazard a guess I'd say they were running V5; perhaps heavily patched.  I idly wonder if any of that work has survived; it would be interesting to see an ARPAnet/NCP implementation for early Unix.

But to address your question yes, Unix was certainly networked well before UUCP emerged in V7.

        - Dan C.

On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 11:42 PM, Mark Longridge <cubexyz@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi folks,

I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp
appeared in Unix v7. It would be interesting to know if one could pass
a file from one Unix v5 machine to another without having to store it
on a magnetic tape.

There's some reference to a mysterious "Spider Interface" in the Unix
v5 manual. It seems to have something to do with DR-11B (which is a
general purpose direct memory access interface to the PDP-11 Unibus).

There's also reference to the "Spider line-printer" :)

Mark
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