From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: mah@mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton) Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 08:09:55 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] networking on unix before uucp In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <53F75D43.4030108@mhorton.net> At Bell Labs, PWB (1, I think, which was V6-based) had a sophisticated RJE engine that could submit jobs to the GE mainframe and get the output back (hence the GECOS field in /etc/passwd.) This was also used to submit jobs to be printed using the opr (off-line print) command. At Berkeley, in 1978 we originally had a "cross-over cable" (basically a null modem, my lousy soldering job) in our patch panel, to allow two UNIX boxes to cat files across - not even Kermit, as I recall. Shortly thereafter in 1978, Eric Schmidt (yes, that Eric Schmidt) wrote Berknet, which was similar to UUCP but didn't use modems, it ran over null modem serial line interconnections. It ran on V6, V7, and the Vax. For a few years, the Berknet link between ucbvax (which had a modem and was on UUCP) and ingvax (which was on the ARPANET) was the gateway between the UUCP and Usenet networks and the ARPANET. On 08/21/2014 08:42 PM, Mark Longridge wrote: > Hi folks, > > I was wondering if Unix had any form of networking before uucp > appeared in Unix v7. It would be interesting to know if one could pass > a file from one Unix v5 machine to another without having to store it > on a magnetic tape. > > There's some reference to a mysterious "Spider Interface" in the Unix > v5 manual. It seems to have something to do with DR-11B (which is a > general purpose direct memory access interface to the PDP-11 Unibus). > > There's also reference to the "Spider line-printer" :) > > Mark > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs