[TUHS] History of select(2)

[Ron Natalie]

I have in a box somewhere a printed copy of the TCP/IP protocol book printed
by SRI.  It's about 3" thick and has the essential protocol RFCs needed at
the time the Arpanet went TCP/IP.   Another slightly smaller one had the
mail RFCs in it.    Almost anybody who was working with these things had
copies of these things on their desk.

Understand that these networks were slow compared to modern standards.
FTPing down that much data wasn't something you did casually.    My mind is
hazy about where the RFPs were archived before the cut over but afterward
they most certainly were in the FTP directory at the SRI-NIC host.   This
was also where you downloaded the host table (though a later RFC made a
non-FTP transfer available as well).

An amusing historical tidbit on the host tables.    The table had entries
that looked like this:
    HOST : 10.0.0.73 : SRI-NIC,NIC : FOONLY-F3 : TENEX :NCP/TELNET,NCP/FTP,
TCP/TELNET, TCP/FTP :

Where you had the IP address, the names for the host, the hardware type, the
OS, and a list of supported protocols.

Now the BSD network code had their own format for /etc/hosts.    A small
yacc program was used to convert the above format to /etc/hosts.    Then a
routine, then just called rhost would look up in /etc/hosts.

Now I thought this was silly.   So the BRL machines just used hosts.txt
directly.   I modified rhost read it without the intermediary hosts.txt.
To accomplish this I went to the appropriate RFC for the file format and
implemented my own little parser.

Now one day, we got our first networked attached laser printer.    We named
it BRL-ZAP and for a CPU type I just put down 68000.   This was a legitimate
thing to put in the host table.   Well, my parser read it fine as did the
TENEX and other parsers, but there was an error in the yacc grammar on the
BSD machines.   Every UNIX system on the net (other than mine) gagged trying
to parse the BRL-ZAP entry.    When people complained I pointed out that
using yacc was pretty silly.   That, gee, there might be some other
important files on UNIX that uses a bunch of fields separated by colons
first and then commas (/etc/passwd) and nobody had felt it necessary to
write a yacc grammar to interpret those.     There was a strong feeling that
I did this on purpose (the fact that I called the machine ZAP didn't help,
but ZAPPING was what we called printing on the laser printers compared to
the mechanical printers back then).