[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

Sven Mascheck mascheck at in-ulm.de
Sun Aug 24 04:02:40 AEST 2014


Doug McIlroy wrote:
> Right from the time Unix came up on the PDP-11 it was
> networked in the sense that it had dial-in and dial-out
> modems. Fairly early on, when Unixes appeared in other
> Bell Labs locations, Charlie Roberts provided a program
> for logging into another machine. It had an escape for
> file transfer, so it covered the basic functionality
> of rsh and ftp. It was not included in distributions,
> however, and its name escapes me.

That's why you recorded it in this great article
"A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer's
 Manual, 1971-1986",  www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf

"The members of the research group had no desire to isolate
 themselves from the rest of the Bell Labs computing community.
 Nor could they at first justify the purchase of equipment such as
 line printers and tape drives, which cost more than their whole
 computer. Thus, besides dial-up access, which was a sine qua non,
 communication with other machines was a necessity. A 2000bps link
 provided remote job entry to the GECOS system at the Bell Labs
 computer center (opr, Thompson, v2). GECOS guru Charlie Roberts
 contributed tss to exploit the link for remote login and interactive
 file transfer (v2)."

Sven



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