IBM PC Network

[Jim Brain]

On 5/23/2021 2:02 AM, Jim Brain via cctalk wrote:
>
>
> I, of course, came from UNIX and TCP/IP land, and 802.2 and all these 
> crazy protocols were just bizarre to me.  I had bought the Comer books 
> right after college because I was trying to implement TCP/IP on my 
> Commodore 64 (got SLIP, TCP, and IP working, back in 1995 or so), and 
> there was a guy at the company named Walter Falby who was a uber 370 
> programmer.  At one point, he was leading the Compuware group writing 
> a program that would trick the 370 into feeding different dates to 
> regular apps on the machine, to be sold as a utility to help companies 
> test their SW for the year 2000 rollover.  Deep knowledge of 370 
> assembler.  Reminds me of "Mel" of the free verse story fame.  Anyway, 
> Falby started asking me about TCP/IP, and I was happy to share what I 
> knew.  He borrowed my Comer books and printouts of the RFCs (not sure 
> where I printed them from back in those days, but they were available 
> somewhere) and implemented a full TCP/IP stack for the 370, they 
> called it Host Communications Interface (HCI).  I'm not sure if 
> Compuware gave HCI away to customers or they just charged a bit for 
> it, but I remember Walter being stupified IBM was selling TCP/IP for 
> such a high price and deigned to do something about it.
Dang, knew I should have checked my memory before I posted.  Walter 
Falby is a great developer as well (still works at BMC/Compuware), but 
the HCI guy's name was Andy Coburn, and he is sadly passed on. A great 
370 developer.