What to preserve from the pre-IP era

On 1/20/14, 12:20 PM, Al Kossow wrote: It's a very interesting question. I'm not sure I can answer without injecting my own experience and bias. I'd like to see a smattering of ethernet-ish non-ip work. Xerox XNS, Novell Netware, Apple Localtalk, Decnet. Certainly 3Mb and 10Mb ethernet. And naturally IBM SNA with a 3270 and CICS. A basic tribute to the phsyical layer, twinax, coax, big ethernet with vampire taps, twisted pair, fiber. Something should to be said about IBM token ring. And Apollo's ring. I think at one time DEC's internal decnet network was pretty damn big. Worth mentioning DDCMP and phase iv. Some tribute to low speed serial, with current loop and rs-232 terminals, from the ASR's up to X terminals. Early modems, including that (swear words) Anderson Jacobson acoustic coupler and the early Hayes products. I don't know what to say about ISO protocols. It might be interesting to say something about military/ga avionics comm standards. There are a lot of them and some of them spilled over. I laugh because now days you update your NAV gear with a USB stick (on the ground :-) The BBN/MIT/ARPAnet IMP work deserves it's own space. It relied on what was around at the time (and yes, how that wikipedia article could not mention Interdata is beyond me). But it should be noted that TCP was not the first stream protocol they used. Maybe a nod to MIT Chaosnet? (ok, Aloha too. perhaps the whole ethernet thing is it's own space). Maybe something about the phone system, T1 lines and sync framing. How the T1 evolved from pcm audio to framed data. (where is my picturephone!!?? :-) ISDN happened along the way, but faded quickly. Worth mentioning as a false start. (I know this is all US centric; Thinks like MINITEL also played a part I'm sure, and 50 other projects I never heard of) I wonder if a small tribute to UUCP is in order. Which begs the question of FIDOnet (which I don't know much about). And well, there's CIS. I once broke into a fleet of dec-10/20's (with a modem) as a youth using a sysop password someone gave me and marveled at being able to hop from one host to another - I must have jumped through 20-30 machine before I got bored. I'm guessing that was all decnet-over-sync-lines. (that was a fun cat and mouse - it was clear the owner was running something in the background which was logging activity. i discovered the logs and then hacked the monitor program not to log and erased the logs. he kept 'fixing it' and restarting it and I kept 'unfixing it' and erasing. that went on for days. i hope he could see the humor in it all. so much for a misspent youth.) Wow. Yes, daunting. Best of luck. -brad