Grant Taylor <ctalk(a)gtaylor.tnetconsulting.net>
Okay. I hadn't considered other DEC OSs that don't support TCP/IP.
AFAIK, VMS was the only DEC operating system (well, excepting the Un*x derivatives) that
supported TCP/IP. There were several third party TCP/IP implementations for VMS (e.g.
Wollongong, CMU, Process Software, ...) and eventually DEC came out with their own
official implementation.
Johnny Bilquist has a TCP suite for RSX, but that's a recent development and was
never a DEC product.
I'm trying to understand how many installations are
actually using
DECnet in Linux / how big the potential problem is / will be.
You mean now, today, for actual real work? I have no idea, but I doubt it's very
many if any at all. There are some of us hobbyists out there though, that still use
DECnet. We even have a worldwide DECnet network tunneled over the Internet, and it's
useful for some of us to have DECnet on Linux. I have such a machine here, with Ubuntu
16.04.7LTS and ESM, kernel 4.4.0-148. I would have upgraded it, but getting some of the
user mode DECnet programs to run on later releases is problematic. Not impossible, but
tricky.
Are you part of the kernel team? I'm not really suggesting that DECnet support be
kept, although there are a few of us who would appreciate it.
Bob