9 Jan
2008
9 Jan
'08
4:46 a.m.
In the 80's DEC and IBM were pretty big on pushing
their own
'networking solutions' and did their best to avoid open protocols, at
least above the link level.
In Montreal, in the days before Teh Internet, each of the four
universities here was using IP internally, but had no IP connectivity
outside themselves. Then DEC, presumably trying to earn some kind of
PR brownie points in support of higher education or some such, donated
routers and leased lines to tie them together - but the routers were
DECnet-only. (I proceeded to use IP/DECnet dual-stack Ultrix machines
to turn this DECnet-only infrastructure into an IP transport...I don't
know how DEC felt about this nose-thumbing at their attempt to lock us
into their proprietary way, but the CRIM treated it as a feature, so it
would have been impolitic for DEC to grumble publicly.)
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