20 Jan
2014
20 Jan
'14
11:28 a.m.
On Jan 20, 2014, at 1:18 PM, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
Of course, the ARPAnet wasn?t always TCP/IP. ARPAnet bits predating that switch would be
seriously interesting. Do IMPs still exist? I think so. Software to run them? Software
for your PDP-11 to talk to the IMP-11 Unibus to IMP interface?
Before the final victory of TCP/IP, there were lots of company-specific networking
protocols. DECnet is of course well known, but other manufacturers had their own too (or
in the case of IBM, several of their own). And there are the other industry or
international standards that didn?t make it, like the whole OSI stack ? used not only by
DEC but also, for example, by CDC.
You can also find interesting bits of networking technology beyond these. For example,
DEC Typeset-11 systems had their own network stack. And they talked to Harris graphics
terminals via multidrop lines driven by DL-11/E interfaces, speaking Bisync. (I wish I
was kidding but I?m not.) Or PLATO with its amazing terminal interconnect scheme, or its
early and apparently entirely undocumented ?Doelz network? for wide area host to host
connections.
Just listing all the protocols out there would be a significant (and worthwhile) task.
For one thing, such a list would tell you what to look for to preserve.
paul
I suspect that
most people won't see much value in preserving bisync
knowledge and hardware, but in my biased experience, there was a lot
of it in the pre-TCP/IP world.
There is a tendency with many people (some professionals) to think
that computer networking is, was, and will always be the ARPAnet, the
Internet, and all things TCP/IP.