[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Mary Ann Horton]

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