[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[Dan Cross]

(And upon slightly closer inspection of the RFC's header, it appears that
it was *written* in March of 1975, though Postel didn't post it until May
of that year.  That certainly predates the V6 release by a few months, so
it seems probable that they were, in fact, running either V5 [possibly with
patches] or a pre-release of V6.)


On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 11:18 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> Unix was on the ARPAnet circa 1975 (if not earlier):
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc681
>
> V6 was "released" in May 1975, and that document was also published in May
> 1975 and says that the software had been running for about a month, so it's
> entirely possible that the ARPAnet Unix work was done before V6 (or perhaps
> they were an early test site: I don't know what the policies were around
> that).  It's been many years since I've read RFC681 closely and from my
> quick skim just now, I don't think they say what version of Unix they're
> running.  It's clear from the RFC that they had been running Unix for more
> than a month given the description of their site, and if I had to hazard a
> guess I'd say they were running V5; perhaps heavily patched.  I idly wonder
> if any of that work has survived; it would be interesting to see an
> ARPAnet/NCP implementation for early Unix.
>
> But to address your question yes, Unix was certainly networked well before
> UUCP emerged in V7.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 11:42 PM, Mark Longridge <cubexyz at gmail.com>
> 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
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20140822/5252b9cc/attachment.html>