First Northern Germany DECnet Party

der> Speaking of which, what's the current DECnet phase? I have some der> DECnot docs for Phase IV which I fetched in 2001, but before I der> start doing anything with them I'd like to make sure they're the der> latest. Phase IV is the one that was all over the place. It comes in some small variants. I forgot the details of that; one of them was intended to avoid the setting of the Ethernet MAC address, to allow it to work with 802.5 NICs that didn't support this. A copy from 2001 would certainly be current. They are probably IV, not IV+, but that's fine, the two interoperate and I doubt IV+ gets you anything extra that matters. There's Phase V, also known as DECnet/OSI. That did get implemented on VMS, perhaps also on DEC's Unix, but nowhere else. And it was a commercial failure -- didn't offer anything useful over Phase IV, and wasted many years within DEC while TCP/IP won the race instead. The Phase IV specs were published and still exist on-line (along with some Phase III specs, which were also published). The intent was to do the same with the Phase V protocol specs, but as far as I can tell that never happened. It's possibly they still exist somewhere on a backup tape. (If so, making readable copies would be tricky -- most of them were created with DECwrite (I think that's the name -- the X app derived from an old snapshot of FrameMaker). paul