13 Jan
2017
13 Jan
'17
3:13 p.m.
On 12 Jan 2017, at 4:54 , Clem Cole wrote:
Paul -- this is a great stuff and fills in some pieces
of my memories.
Thanks!
The point is that while I have no memory of capac(),
but I can confirm that I definitely programmed with the empty() system call and Rand ports
on a v6 based kernel in the mid-1970s and that it was definitely at places besides Rand
themselves.
Thank you for confirming that. If anybody knows of surviving source for these extensions
I'd love to hear about it. Although the description in the implementation report is
clear enough to recreate it (it would seem to be one file similar to pipe.c and a pseudo
device driver similar in size to mem.c), original code is better. It is also possible that
the code in pipe.c was modified to drive both pipes and ports -- there would have been a
lot of similarity between the two, and kernel space was at a premium.
[...] confirming something I have been saying for few
years and some people have had a hard time believing. The specifications for what would
become IP and TCP were kicking around the ARPAnet in the late 1970s.
My understanding is that all RFC's and IEN's were available to all legit users
of the Arpanet. By 1979 there were 90 nodes (IMP's) and about 200 hosts connected. I
don't get the impression that stuff was always easy to find, with Postel making a few
posts about putting together "protocol information binders". Apparently nobody
had the idea to put all RFC's in a directory and give FTP access to it.
I am not sure how available this stuff was outside the Arpanet community. I think I should
put a question out about this, over on the internet history mailing list.
As an aside: IMHO, conceptually the difference between NCP and TCP wasn't all that
big. In my current understanding the big difference was that NCP assumes in-order,
reliable delivery of packets (as was the case between IMP's) and that TCP allows for
unreliable links. Otherwise, the connection build-up and tear-down and the flow control
were similar. See for instance RFC54 and RFC55 from 1970. My point is: yes, these concepts
were kicking around for over a decade in academia before BSD.
Paul