[TUHS] History of select(2)

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se>

    > And RFC791 is dated September 1981.

Yes, but it had pretty much only editorial changes from RFC-760, dated January
1980 (almost two years before), and from a number of IEN's dated even earlier
than that (which I'm too lazy to paw through).

    > So I have this problem with people who say that they implemented TC/IP
    > in 1978 for some reason.

If you look at IEN-44, June 1978 (issued shortly after the fateful June 15-16
meeting, where the awful 32-bit address decision was taken), you will see that
the packet format as of that date was pretty much what we have today (the
format of addresses kept changing for many years, but I'll put that aside for
now).

    > Especially if they say ... it was working well in heterogeneous
    > networks.

TCP/IP didn't work "well" for a long time after 1981 - until we got the
congestion control stuff worked out in the late 80's. And IIRC the routing/
addressing stuff took even longer.

    > I don't think it's correct to say that it was TCP/IP, as we know it
    > today.

Why not? A box implementing the June '78 spec would probably talk to a current
one (as long as suitable addresses were used on each end).

    > It was either some other protocol (like NCP) or some other version of
    > IP, which was not even published as an RFC.

Nope. And don't put too much weight on the RFC part - TCP/IP stuff didn't
start getting published as RFC's until it was _done_ (i.e. ready for the
ARPANet to convert from NCP to TCP/IP - which happened January 1, 1983).

All work prior to TCP/IP being declared 'done' is documented in IEN's (very
similar documents to RFC's, distributed by the exact same person - Jon
Postel).

	Noel