From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Cc: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Re: [TUHS] BTL summer employees
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2020 08:53:22 -0400 (EDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200810125322.D85FD18C082@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> (raw)
> From: Lars Brinkhoff
> the Dover printer spooler was written using Snyder's C compiler
I'm not sure if that's correct. I don't remember with crystal clarity all the
details of how we got files to the Dover, but here's what I recall (take with
1/2 a grain of salt, my memory may have dropped some bits). To start with,
there were different paths from the CHAOS and TCP/IP worlds. IIRC, there was a
spooler on the Alto which ran the Dover, and the two worlds had separate paths
to get to it.
From the CHAOS world, there was a protocol translation which ran on whatever
machine had the AI Lab's 3Mbit Ethernet interface - probably MIT-AI's
CHAOS-11? If you look at the Macro-11 code from that, you should see it - IIRC
it translated (on the fly) from CHAOS to EFTP, the PUP prototocol which the
spooler ran 'natively'.
From the IP world, IIRC, Dave Clark had adapted his Alto TCP/IP stack (written
in BCPL) to run in the spooler alongside the PUP software; it included a TFTP
server, and people ran TFTP from TCP/IP machines to talk to it. (IP access to
the 3Mbit Ethernet was via another UNIBUS Ethernet interface which was plugged
into an IP router which I had written. The initial revision was in Macro-11; a
massive kludge which used hairy macrology to produce N^2 discrete code paths,
one for every pair of interfaces on the machine. Later that was junked, and
replaced with the 'C Gateway' code.)
I can, if people are interested, look on the MIT-CSR machine dump I have
to see how it (a TCP/IP machine) printed on the Dover, to confirm that
it used TFTP.
I don't recall a role for any PDP-10 C code, though. I don't think there was a
spooler anywhere except on the Dover's Alto. Where did that bit about the
PDP-10 spooler in C come from, may I enquire? Was it a CMU thing, or something
like that?
Noel
next reply other threads:[~2020-08-10 12:54 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-08-10 12:53 Noel Chiappa [this message]
2020-08-10 13:21 ` Lars Brinkhoff
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2020-08-10 14:02 Noel Chiappa
2020-08-10 17:08 ` Lawrence Stewart
2020-08-10 18:13 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2020-08-02 13:40 Doug McIlroy
2020-08-02 13:57 ` arnold
2020-08-02 17:13 ` Doug McIlroy
2020-08-03 9:24 ` arnold
2020-08-02 15:12 ` Robert Diamond
2020-08-02 19:05 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-08-03 5:14 ` Heinz Lycklama
2020-08-03 12:55 ` John P. Linderman
2020-08-03 16:26 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-08-10 0:48 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-10 0:53 ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-10 6:33 ` Lars Brinkhoff
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