[TUHS] Directory services in early Unix networks?

Aaron Jackson aaron at aaronsplace.co.uk
Thu Nov 8 05:08:50 AEST 2018


> Dan - all good questions, but I think you are mixing a few things (which is
> easy to do as they all had different evolutionary paths).
>
>
>    - ARPAnet was Rand, UCLA and UofI in the early to mid 70s.
>    - UCLA line would fork competely with the original Locus work of the mid
>    70's, which would reappear later in the 80's post BSD
>    - IP Networking was done by BBN for 4.1BSD in the late 70s - originally
>    as an OS independant stack (hence it has its own memory manager to
>    insulated it from the local S).  Besides UNIX I think it went into HP's MPE
>    and maybe a couple f other systems.
>    - The BBN IP stack was then repliced into UNIX by UCB/CRSG as 4.1A with
>    Joy's sockets layer in 82/83
>    - HOST.TXT was finaly abandoned and BIND was then done (primarily at UCB
>    by peed on by many) - I want to say eary 80's  the SCCS files might give
>    you some hints.
>    - Hesiod was MIT/Athenia and NIS by Sun were  later developed somewhat
>    in the same time frame   (mid to late 80s)
>    - CHAOS was completely seperate, although influenced the BBN code and
>    was the early/mid 70s.
>    - BTL's DataKit of course, had the UoI (Chesson) influence was late 70s.
>    - Best I can tell Newcastle was complete seperate from all of this (also
>    late 70s).
>
>
> Clem
>
Perhaps also worthy of a mention is Network Registration Service (NRS)
used in the UK academic network (JANET). Similar idea to
HOSTS.TXT. Periodic download and munge.

More interestingly though, NRS used the opposite ordering to DNS, so
"cs.nott.ac.uk" was "uk.ac.nott.cs", which became a problem when
Czechoslovakia got their TLD (.cs) in the 80s as the both DNS and NRS
were used in parallel for some period of time.

I believe NRS was still being used to some capacity by the time
Czechoslovakia split in 93.

Aaron

--
Aaron Jackson - M6PIU
http://aaronsplace.co.uk/



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