[COFF] ARPAnet now 4 nodes

[Rob Gingell]

On 12/5/19 5:19 PM, amp1ron at gmail.com wrote:
> Maybe some of these hosts files that Lars Brinkhoff gathered together will help:
> 
> 	https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt

Thanks for the pointer. I had come across those. The trouble is, for the 
NCP era, there's only one host file in the collection. The rest are all 
from the post-Internet transition (and thus the numbers can't be 
inferred to convey a probable chronological sequence.)

And for the one from the NCP era, it's the one that only has the first 
page and so it's missing a bunch of stuff. (It's not really a HOSTS.TXT 
file but a prettified annotated edition with other information, and so 
the file in the repository is a PDF of a scanned physical printout.)

Still even that one page adds some information. From the information 
exchanged previously we had hosts 1 through 4, and then host 13. And the 
likely matches for about two dozen numbers. And the fragment from the 
one page in the repository adds 5 (though it's clear from the comments 
that it was a recycled number), 9, 12, confirms 13, 14, 15, 16, and then 
a smattering of others up to 232.

Some of the liaison names are tickling memories of long ago acquaintances!

I had thought that once upon a time there was an archive of a mid-1970s 
TENEX distribution, like 1.33 or 1.34. The distribution might have 
embedded a stale HOSTS.TXT file that would have been complete for the 
time. But I haven't managed to find it again.

Still none of this really answers Larry's query in a satisfying way. I 
imagine somewhere there's just a ledger that has the answer to the 
question I thought he posed about who showed up when with what on the 
ARPAnet. The collected papers of someone like Jon Postel might have 
something of that nature (but a brief search doesn't reveal an archive 
literally like that) but then substantial body of his work lives on in 
the RFC library.