[TUHS] Re: Unix V8 Chaosnet, any takers?

[Tom Teixeira <tjteixeira@earthlink.net>]

On 7/14/22 2:19 PM, Ron Natalie wrote:
> Note, I don’t know what you’re planning, but Chaos couldn’t take any 
> propagation delay.   It’s really limited to a LAN implementation as 
> originally designed.
>
It definitely had subnet routing, and as I recall, the KL10's and other 
machines with front end I/O processors generally used chaosnet routing 
between the host itself and the rest of the network. i.e. the I/O 
processor was on one subnet, the host on a second subnet and the rest of 
the "LAN" was on the other side of the I/O processor. My recollection is 
that unlike an IP router, a Chaosnet node had only one address, and 
routing tables determined which device to send the data on.

And LCS definitely had multiple coax cable runs with each run a subnet 
with routing between. But with a maximum of 256 subnets, routing was 
much simpler.

I wonder how much benefit is available from using network switches 
rather than collision detection and retransmit, though the virtual token 
was supposed to reduce collisions somewhat.