[TUHS] non-blocking IO

[Paul Ruizendaal]

> At around that point in time (I don't have the very _earliest_ code, to get an exact date, but the oldest traces I see [in mapalloc(), below] are from September '78), the CSR group at MIT-LCS (which were the people in LCS doing networking) was doing a lot with asynchronous I/O (when you're working below the reliable stream level, you can't just do a blocking 'read' for a packet; it pretty much has to be asynchronous). I was working in Unix V6 - we were building an experimental 1Mbit/second ring - and there was work in Multics as well.

> I don't think the wider Unix community heard about the Unix work, but our group regularly filed updates on our work for the 'Internet Monthly Reports', which was distributed to the whole TCP/IP experimental community. If you can find an archive of early issues (I'm too lazy to go look for one), we should be in there (although our report will alsocover the Multics TCP/IP work, and maybe some other stuff too).

Sounds very interesting!

Looked around a bit, but I did not find a source for the “Internet Monthly Reports” for the late 70’s (rfc-editor.org/museum/ has them for the 1990’s).

In the 1970’s era, it seems that NCP Unix went in another direction, using newly built message and event facilities to prevent blocking. This is described in "CAC Technical Memorandum No. 84, Illinois Inter-Process Communication Facility for Unix.” - but that document appears lost as well.

Ah, well, topics for another day.