Found a post by dmr about this in the 'net.unix-wizards' newsgroup:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/net.unix-wizards/subject$3A…
It would seem that my understanding of it is indeed how dmr designed it.
At the end of the post there is an example: "For example, from my machine, I can type
"rlogin purdy" and connect to a Sequent machine running 4.2; the TCP connection
goes over Datakit to machine "research" where it is gatewayed to a local
ethernet that purdy is connected to."
I'm not quite sure how on the Sequent machine the Datakit channel would be hooked up
to the 4.2BSD TCP stack. Perhaps something equivalent to e.g. 'SLiRP' was used,
perhaps there was a pseudo device that hooked into the network interface layer.
Paul
Begin forwarded message:
From: Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl>
Subject: TCP/IP networking in 8th edition unix
Date: 22 November 2017 0:41:27 GMT+01:00
To: TUHS main list <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
I'm trying to figure out how tcp/ip networking worked in 8th edition Unix.
I'm starting from dmr's paper about streams
(
http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/st.html) the V8 man pages
(
http://man.cat-v.org/unix_8th/3/) and browsing the source code (tarball here
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dan_Cross_v8/)
In the below I use 'socket' to mean a file descriptor bound to a network
connection. My current understanding is like this:
[... details removed ...]
Anybody on the list with 8th edition experience who
can confirm that the above understanding is about correct?
Paul