[TUHS] Unix with TCP/IP for small PDP-11s

[pnr@planet.nl (Paul Ruizendaal)]

On 23 May 2017, at 1:25 , Clem Cole wrote:

> As for DataKit et al..  Greg Chesson was a grad student at UoI.  The UoI folks did the original  V6 Arpanet for UNIX code and Greg was the one of the primary developers same.  What I do not remember is who came first, the Rand networking work for the UoI work.   Rand did the the ports (later called named pipes) and a few other things pretty early.   But again all those dates sort of mix together in the early middle 70s.  USENIX was not yet publishing proceedings so it's hard to keep straight.   It pretty much just email and memories of those of us that were sharing things at the time.

These dates I can fill in:
- UoI Arpanet Unix was initially done between December 1974 and March 1975, building on the experience gained with the earlier ANTS I and II projects.
- Rand ports were done in 1977, under contract to the air force (report dated June '77).

> Anyway, when Greg graduated, he was hired by Ken when he finished and developed DataKit at Bell labs.   One of the pieces of datakit that was released as part of V7 was Greg's mpx(2) code - which was the multiplexer.

Interesting. I always thought that mpx files were driven by the work on the Blit terminal, the link to networking is new to me.

I'm looking into the history of Spider and early Datakit. Sandy Fraser was kind enough to send me the 1974 report on Spider and it already mentions actual usage for remote printing, remote login and a central 'file store'. Spider was an interesting bit of technology, essentially it linked a dozen or so computers over a 1.5Mb/s shared link (a daisy chained twisted pair cable) to a central router/switch. There was only ever one Spider router, but the design allowed for multiple routers to be connected over T1 long distance lines.

Does anybody know of surviving v5/v6/v7 code for Spider networking (e.g. the 'tiu' device driver, the 'nfs' file transfer package, etc.)?