From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: gingell at computer.org (Rob Gingell) Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2019 19:25:38 -0800 Subject: [COFF] ARPAnet now 4 nodes In-Reply-To: <011f01d5abd3$41187a30$c3496e90$@gmail.com> References: <20191205041940.GP32688@mcvoy.com> <29ffe051-066c-7675-f7cc-5356b17c34de@computer.org> <20191205190528.GT32688@mcvoy.com> <011f01d5abd3$41187a30$c3496e90$@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 12/5/19 5:19 PM, amp1ron at gmail.com wrote: > Maybe some of these hosts files that Lars Brinkhoff gathered together will help: > > https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt Thanks for the pointer. I had come across those. The trouble is, for the NCP era, there's only one host file in the collection. The rest are all from the post-Internet transition (and thus the numbers can't be inferred to convey a probable chronological sequence.) And for the one from the NCP era, it's the one that only has the first page and so it's missing a bunch of stuff. (It's not really a HOSTS.TXT file but a prettified annotated edition with other information, and so the file in the repository is a PDF of a scanned physical printout.) Still even that one page adds some information. From the information exchanged previously we had hosts 1 through 4, and then host 13. And the likely matches for about two dozen numbers. And the fragment from the one page in the repository adds 5 (though it's clear from the comments that it was a recycled number), 9, 12, confirms 13, 14, 15, 16, and then a smattering of others up to 232. Some of the liaison names are tickling memories of long ago acquaintances! I had thought that once upon a time there was an archive of a mid-1970s TENEX distribution, like 1.33 or 1.34. The distribution might have embedded a stale HOSTS.TXT file that would have been complete for the time. But I haven't managed to find it again. Still none of this really answers Larry's query in a satisfying way. I imagine somewhere there's just a ledger that has the answer to the question I thought he posed about who showed up when with what on the ARPAnet. The collected papers of someone like Jon Postel might have something of that nature (but a brief search doesn't reveal an archive literally like that) but then substantial body of his work lives on in the RFC library.