Doug McIlroy wrote:
Right from the time Unix came up on the PDP-11 it was
networked in the sense that it had dial-in and dial-out
modems. Fairly early on, when Unixes appeared in other
Bell Labs locations, Charlie Roberts provided a program
for logging into another machine. It had an escape for
file transfer, so it covered the basic functionality
of rsh and ftp. It was not included in distributions,
however, and its name escapes me.
That's why you recorded it in this great article
"A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer's
Manual, 1971-1986",
www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf
"The members of the research group had no desire to isolate
themselves from the rest of the Bell Labs computing community.
Nor could they at first justify the purchase of equipment such as
line printers and tape drives, which cost more than their whole
computer. Thus, besides dial-up access, which was a sine qua non,
communication with other machines was a necessity. A 2000bps link
provided remote job entry to the GECOS system at the Bell Labs
computer center (opr, Thompson, v2). GECOS guru Charlie Roberts
contributed tss to exploit the link for remote login and interactive
file transfer (v2)."
Sven