26 Jun
2022
26 Jun
'22
7:41 a.m.
Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl> once said:
Wanted to post my notes as plain text, but the bullets
/ sub-bullets get lost.
Here is a 2 page PDF with my notes on Research Datakit:
https://www.jslite.net/notes/rdk.pdf
Really nice outline. I felt some déjà vu when opening the document: I
remember reading your notes in April of 2020.
Would you happen to know where I can find copies of these three
papers?
A. G. Fraser, "Datakit - A Modular Network for Synchronous and
Asynchronous Traffic", Proc. ICC 79, June 1979, Boston, Ma.,
pp.20.1.1-20.1.3
G. L. Chesson, "Datakit Software Architecture", Proc. ICC 79, June
1979, Boston Ma., pp.20.2.1-20.2.5
G. L. Chesson and A. G. Fraser, "Datakit Network Architecture," Proc.
Compcon 80, February 1980, San Fransisco CA., pp.59-61
A secondary takeaway is that Research Datakit
eventually settled on a
three-level ascii namespace: “area/trunk/switch”. On each switch, the
hosts would be known by name, and each connection request had a
service name as parameter. In an alternate reality we would maybe have
used “ca/stclara/mtnview!google!www” to do a search.
To connect to one of the Plan 9 cpu servers at Bell Labs, you would
dial "nj/astro/helix!9fs". I do wonder how the relative hierarchical
naming would have evolved to encompass the entire Internet. Would
it have been more like "com/google/search!http"? Who knows? ☺
Thanks,
Anthony