John Willis wrote:
madodel wrote:
>And what was the first operating system to have builtin support for
>internet access? Did Windows for Workgroups have this or was that just
>LAN networking? OS/2 Warp had dial up internet access for IBM's ISP as
>well as a SLIP dialer for other ISPs, when released in 1994, but not a
>full TCP/IP stack until Warp Connect in 1995.
>
>
not quite true. OS/2 extended edition included a TCP/IP stack as early as
v1.1 iirc.
I think that it is fair to include an operating system which has
distinct device drivers for all hardware as having built-in support
for that hardware. For example, support for MSCP (or SCSI)
hard drives first became available under RT-11 around 1985.
Note that DEC itself did not have a SCSI host adapter at the
time - CMD produced a 3rd party Qbus host adapter. But
SCSI hard drives could be used. The other PDP-11 operating
systems each had their DU device drives.
Just because the DU.SYS device driver was a separate file
should not preclude fact that the operating system did not
have built-in support for SCSI hard drives - even though DEC
did not support SCSI hard drive use until the RQZX1 host
adapter many years later.
Likewise, my opinion is that the PDP-11 (and probably
other DEC systems) could be said to have internet access
via a device driver which handled ether net or in some cases
other software using dialup modems. The question of an
TCP/IP stack is not software I am familiar with, but again,
just because that software was in a device driver (assuming
that to be the case) should still not prevent a user from saying
that there is built-in support for the internet.
I am probably wrong in making the above comments since
using the TCP/IP stack is not part of my experience. But
how the software was implemented under the PDP-11
operating systems, especially RT-11, with separate files
for the device drivers should not have precluded making
the statement that the operating system had built-in support
for the internet - in the same manner as RT-11 first had
support for SCSI hard drives around 1983.
Zane Healy, and especially Megan Gentry, would probably
be able to comment with more authority on this question.
For my self, I used a dial-up modem to connect to the
internet on a PDP-11 about 15 years ago, but very little
more.
Jerome Fine
