27 Jan
2017
27 Jan
'17
3:50 p.m.
That is helpful info. I sure hope the source survived in your basement.
Bob Metcalfe is indeed a professor at UT now and Bruce Borden is at gThrive. I will reach
out to both and ask for their support in getting the code released. If the company
founders support the release of 40 year old code with no current commercial value, we
might have a good case with 3Com's general counsel.
I was not aware of a link between Bruce Borden and Rand Ports. The Rand reports about this
were written by Sunshine and Zucker, and I had assumed Zucker was the implementor of the
code.
Paul
On 27 Jan 2017, at 0:20 , Clem Cole wrote:
Indeed, It was their first product, it was primarily
written by Bruce Borden (of Rand Ports fame) and Greg Shaw- and I was the first customer
for same @ Tektronix [we debugged it and our own against Stan and my VMS implementation].
Steve Glaser wrote a HyperChannel driver for it, which is a pretty amazing piece of work.
BTW: Somewhere, I have the mailing envelope that is dated the "32 of December,
1980" because they had an end of the year clause with their VC's and ran into a
problem right before they shipped it too me. I thought that was pretty cool, so I kept
it.
As for if I have contents of the UNET tape -- i.e. the bits themselves... the answer is
maybe. I'm not sure to be honest. The original tape would have been at Tek but I
did have somethings in my archives from those days, i.e. my home directory which in couple
of cases has compressed tar or cpio images of interesting things. For instance it was
discovered a few years back that I last known copy of UCDS - which Dennis was able to get
released as a very late delivery of part of V7 and Warren now has in his archives.
The point is, I do have a box of tapes from those days in my basement that I have not
tried to read in a few years - so assuming I can read them (which is a huge) if although
we did succeed as with UCSD and I have the information you are looking for ... the
status/ownership of the bits is 3Com's -- which makes it sticky. It's there
copy-written IP.
We would need to find someone at 3Com to release it. Borden might be able to help as the
original author, but he has not worked for 3Com for eons, plus I have not talked to him a
few years, although I may know how to find him. Bob Metcalfe might also be able to help,
but other than being a stock holder, I'm not sure what influence he has with 3Com
management. Similarly, I have not spoken to Bob is while either, in fact the last time I
did he was still a Principal at Polaris and one our Board of Directors at Ammasso -- I
think he's now @ UT Austin.
Clem
On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 5:04 PM, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl> wrote:
Just stumbled over another early TCP/IP for Unix:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/3Com/3Com_UNET_Nov80.pdf
It would seem to be a design similar to that of Holmgren's (NCP-based) Network Unix
(basic packet processing in the kernel, connection management in a user space daemon). In
time and in concept it would sit in between the Wingfield ('79, all user space) and
the Gurwitz ('81, all kernel) implementations.
I think it was distributed initially as a mod versus V7 and later as a mod versus 2BSD.
Would anybody here know of surviving source of this implementation?
Thanks,
Paul