[TUHS] BSD/v8 TCP/IP (was Shell control through external commands)

Erik E. Fair fair-tuhs at netbsd.org
Mon Sep 12 15:48:29 AEST 2016


Two big debates I recall:

	Datagram (packets) versus virtual circuits (telephone calls).

	Berkeley (BSD) sockets versus Bell Labs (dmr) "streams" APIs.
	https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/fa01/cse221/papers/ritchie-stream-io-belllabs84.pdf

It is important to note that the STREAMS stuff that eventually was foisted on
unfortunates from USG in System V was  - despite being derived from Ritchie's
work - yet another ... thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STREAMS

dmr was trying to replace the abomination that the tty drivers had become (and
I still wish we'd adopted his APIs and work for that purpose to this day),
but trying to force everything into a connection-oriented framework for a
datagram/packet network has conceptual limitations, and to AT&T's chagrin,
the Internet is not an X.25 or Datakit network.

Plan 9 also had some interesting work in it that I wish we'd adopted.

	Erik Fair



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