[TUHS] non-blocking IO

[Lawrence Stewart]

I remember working on getting Arpanet access on an 11/34 running V7 around 1978 or 1979.  (SU-ISL). We used an 11/23 as a front end to run NCP, using a variation of Rand’s code.  I wrote some sort of bisync driver for packet communications between the /23 and the /34, and I think added an IOCTL or some hack to ask if there was a message ready.  So a polling variety of non-blocking I/O :)

Meanwhile, on the Alto, surely an underpowered machine, the style for UI programming and asynch I/O was mostly event driven, much like libevent in more recent years.  I found that very easy to understand.

The main trajectory of PARC was lightweight threads calling synchronous I/O which really has to be counted as a Bad Idea not yet fully stamped out.

I’ve always thought select(2) was a pretty good thing.  In 1995 at Open Market we had a single-process web server that had no difficulties running 1000 to 1200 connections.  I think that was BSD, and later OSF-1.

-L