[TUHS] Re: forgotten versions

Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> writes: When I was at AT&T in the early to mid '90s Datakit could manifest in a couple of ways. The simplest was as a tty .. that is you had a serial terminal and used a dial string with bangs in it to get somewhere. This method would have used some number of copper pairs into a RJ45 to DB25 adaptor connected to the terminal. The terminals were usually 730s or 6xx (630s maybe). They had some graphics ability, sort of, with some windowing support. The version of SVR3 we had running on the Vaxs had a program in it that would be able to take advantage of the windowing features of the 730 over a serial tty line (multiple windows, X-Windows like sort of). I have totally forgotten what that was called, however. These terminals also had a mouse with them. The second way that Datakit would show itself was as a fiber pair tied directly to a computer system. There were Datakit fiber boards for nearly all of the platforms that the group I was in used... Vax (via a companion box), Tandem, Sun Sparc, at the very least. There was, usually, a third party kernel driver required that would sometimes be a bit messy and/or have a personality to it. This set up sometimes provided a dkcu command and/or a modified cu command and you could use a bang path dial string from the system to get somewhere else using the Datakit network and act like a tty. Or, you could do native Datakit in your user land code. This is what the product I worked on did to talk to a Datakit network at the RBOCs to get access to the switches in the telco network for monitoring purposes. Often in those cases, Datakit would be transported over a X.25 network. Later, as ethernet and TCP/UDP/IP became the thing, the switches learned how to speak TCP/IP, although sometimes indirectly though a translator box in front of the switch. A number of the telco switches we talked to spoke a dialect of X.25 called BX.25 (Bell X.25 or some such) and the translator boxes would exist on the switch side and our side and basically tunnel BX.25 over TCP/IP. This was a bit different then using the Datakit network to get to the switch, but I seem to remember that some RBOCs did something where BX.25 was sent via Datakit which in the wider area network was transported over X.25 to the monitoring system. There were things called Datakit switches that was a cabinet a few feet tall and a couple of feet wide. It housed a bunch of boards of your choosing depending on how you wanted to use Datakit. Our group had their own switch at the site I was at run by the persons dealing with our development lab. There was also a number of Datakit switches for the site itself run by the general IT organization. I seem to remember those switches having hot pluggable boards with an embedded 3B system inside (although I may be misremembering that a bit). -- Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org