[TUHS] networking on unix before uucp

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 01:00:45PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> > It was quite astounding to see the wide range of performance impacts
> > this had on various systems.  3B* systems would tip over and die, except
> > for the (built by Convergent Tech) 3B1.
>
> Sheesh, you people keep bringing up stuff from my past.  My buddy Rob
> Netzer (used to be a prof at Brown, now works on BitKeeper with me)
> had one of those 3B1s.  Neat machine.  Sort of like a desktop VAX.

I had one too. (Also a trailblazer and then a worldblazer.) The 3B1 ran
SVR2; the BSD networking was available as an add-on with the ethernet
card.

I spent many happy hours working on that box, developing gawk and its
documentation; it was slow enough that you could see algorithmic
differences, e.g. standard diff vs. GNU diff.

It had one of those great AT&T keyboards (as did the blit).  The UI
wasn't anything special to write home about though.

For a while there was a separate 3b1.* set of newsgroups and an
archive of stuff at Ohio State; there remains a comp.sys.3b1 group
that still has some activity as new people try to revive some of
these machines and others who had them help out. Someone was writing
an emulator, but I don't think it ever got finished.

Ah, the memories .... :-)

Arnold