[TUHS] Origins of PPP

[Doug McIntyre]

On Thu, Dec 05, 2019 at 11:34:48AM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> I’m looking for the origins of SLIP and PPP on Unix. Both seem to have been developed long before their RFC’s appeared.
> 
> As far as I can tell, SLIP originally appeared in 3COM’s UNET for the PDP11, around 1980. From the TUHS Unix tree, first appearance in BSD seems to be 4.3 (1986).
> 
> Not sure when PPP first appeared, but the linux man page for pppd has a credit that goes back to Carnegie Mellon 1984. First appearance in BSD seems to be FreeBSD 5.3 (2004), which seems improbably late (same source).


Yes, I remember doing CMU pppd v1.4 or so on SunOS v4.x in the
1991-1994 time period. SL/IP was more prevelent because it was easier to find devices doing it.

Version 2.x of the package started adding support into Linux/*BSD when they started appearing.

I don't think the current repo (https://ppp.samba.org/) has much of the earlier v1.x history.