On 7/3/20 9:21 AM, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote: Your writeup and the links are quite helpful - like most stuff like this, I lack the historical context and appreciate it when folks fill in the gaps like this. Great idea. If I'd come across a TOC, I would have had a better idea of how far to pursue the primary material. In this case, it was worth the effort, regardless. A bit of a ranting reflection: I love the way these early works were written. To my mind, sometime around the mid 1980's folks started baking in so many more assumptions than the early writers that their work needlessly confuses newbies. Thankfully, we seem to be cycling back around to better documentation in some sectors of the tech world (FreeBSD manpages are one example). It's like back in the day, everybody was new enough to the ideas that they had to be carefully explained, terms had to be defined (agreed upon), clear, and detailed examples had to be provided for pretty much any task that was needed. Then once folks had a community going, they jargonified it mercilessly, started the whole RTFM clique and littered the literature with their private language. This continued for a number of decades. In the early 1990's The baby BSD's, Linux, and Minix were born and while at first it was all geeks, eventually, lots of people with all kinds of backgrounds started delving into them. Here we are in 2020 and the number of folks playing around with network related material (and the OSes that make this playground pleasurable) is at an all time high. This generation wouldn't know a bit from a bridle and so they need the clear explanations, agreed upon language, and detailed examples once again. Unfortunately, the accretion of relevant material over the decades makes even fairly well written works gargantuan and by their very size, difficult to grasp easily. So, for this reason primarily I like the classics :). The good news is I'm starting to see a return to the heart of the style in some corners. Let's hope it continues. While the struggles of figuring things out the hard way has some degree of merit, a well written document that is relevant to the task at hand is like having a mentor at hand. I'll never forget installing Unix v6 on a SIMH emulated PDP 11, way back in 2015, with only my printed copy of "SETTING UP UNIX ? Sixth Edition" by Dennis Ritchie at hand. After I learned what a disk pack was (unbelievable) and how it related to the devices provided by SIMH (thanks Noel and other SIMH/TUHS folks), I was able to follow his instructions exactly and boot up a then forty-some year old OS. In the process, I gained a great deal of respect for his ability to virtually apprentice someone in the black art of research unix even decades later. Back in the present: Many thanks Noel and those of y'all who are similarly minded, for your efforts to sustain correct history and its attendant explicit and tacit knowledge. Keep up the good work! Regards, Will