Announcing TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS

[Mouse]

>>> If you happen to have an RSX system which you are conneting from,
>>> you can also try getting the BQTCP.TAP tape image.  Such an image
>>> will not transport cleanly to a non-RSX system, however.
>> I'm curious: why wouldn't it?  [...]
> Nah.  The problem is simpler than that.  It all relates to the fact
> that files under RSX are very different than under Unix.  File in RSX
> are organized in different ways.  And virtual tapes are of variable
> sized records.  So, how would I communicate that across FTP?  And the
> actual length of those records?

FTP has a lot of capabilities many people are totally unaware of; see
RFC 959.  (Admittedly, depressingly many people are unaware FTP even
_exists_....)  For what you sketch, I'd suggest record structure
(STRU R) and block mode (MODE B).

> Essentially any binary file under RSX cannot be transferred over FTP,
> [...]

Sounds to me as though the truth is more like, cannot be transferred to
or from typical "everything is a bag of bytes" Unix-mindset FTP
implementations.  Unless there's something particularly arcane you
haven't hinted at, I don't see anything that would prevent transferring
them over standard FTP, given a server and client that actually
understand that FTP is more than a bag-of-bytes transfer tool.

>> I'm tempted to pick up the code just to read it over, as I'm sure
>> there's a lot I could learn from it, but I doubt I'll have the
>> leisure to indulge that inclination anytime soon. :-(
> It will take a lot of time to browse through the thing.  The basic
> ARP, IP, UDP, TCP, and a couple of tools alone are about 500K of
> MACRO-11.

I'm not surprised.  It will definitely be a while until I have the
leisure to give it a read-through.

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