[TUHS] Micnet Was: Re: Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Josh Good]

On 2021 Mar 18, 12:27, Mike Knell via TUHS wrote:
> 
> > On 18 Mar 2021, at 10:44, Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Does anybody here know the backstory to Micnet and/or how it worked?
> 
> The Xenix communications manual has plenty of detail on how to set it up:
> http://www.nj7p.org/Manuals/PDFs/Intel/174461-001.pdf
> 
> Looks as if it built a routed network among a set of Xenix machines using
> conventional serial lines, including remote login / file transfer / mail
> ervices.

This SCO technical article explains in detail how to set up Micnet
networking on SCO Unix.

https://www.scosales.com/ta/kb/103649.htmlOB

Amusingly, the article says "The System Administrator's Guide for older
versions of SCO UNIX System V/386 contained a section on the Micnet network,
but this is not present in the SCO UNIX System V Release 3.2 Version 4.0
documentation. The documentation for this network is provided here.  Users
who wish to use this network system will require this documentation."

So it seems by the early 90's SCO was indeed phasing out the old Xenix
Micnet networking scheme.

Reading that article is interesting, and Micnet seems to have been a fragile
concoction. The article even says at the end: "You can only use mail to
transfer small files.  Large files are randomly truncated by mail." Not the
most reassuring thing to read about the computer system you are using...

-- 
Josh Good