[TUHS] Early Unix Spider network
Noel Chiappa
jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Sat May 27 23:52:59 AEST 2017
> From: Paul Ruizendaal
>>> The report I have is: "SPIDER-a data communication experiment"
>>> ...
>>> I think it can be public now, but doing some checks.
OK, that would be great to have online. I _think_ the hardcopy I have
(somewhere! :-) is that report, but my memory should not be trusted.
The people working on TCP/IP did know of the Spider work (like they knew of
the Cambridge ring work), but it didn't really have any impact; it was a
totally different direction than the one we were going in.
>>> it turns out that the TIU driver was in Warren's repo all along:
V4?! Wow. I'd have never guessed it went that far back.
>>> The code calls snstat()
>> The object code for snstat() is in libc.a in the dmr's V5 image.
>> Reconstructed, the source code is here:
>> ...
>> In short, snstat() is a modified stty call
Yes, I looked and found the original source, appended below.
>>> Could that be the tiu sys call (#45) in the sysent.c table for V4-V6?
I wonder if we'll ever be able to find a copy of the kernel code for that
tiu() system call. And I wonder what it did?
> [1] Oldest alarm() code I can find is in PWB1
> ...
> Either alarm existed in V5 and V6 .. or is was added after V6 was
> released, perhaps soon after. In the latter case the 'nfs' code that we
> have must be later than 1974
Remember, that source came from the MIT system, which is a modified PWB1.
So it's not surprising it's using PWB1 system calls.
Noel
--------
/ C interface to spider status call
.globl _snstat
.globl cerror
_snstat:
mov r5,-(sp)
mov sp,r5
mov 4(r5),r0
mov 6(r5),0f
mov 8(r5),0f+2
sys stty; 0f
bec 1f
jmp cerror
1:
clr r0
mov (sp)+,r5
rts pc
.data
0: .=.+6
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