[TUHS] Unix NCP protocol stack for ARPANET

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Tue Oct 26 04:50:15 AEST 2021


    > From: "Ron Natalie"

    > However, the last NCP host table shows this statistic for DEC machines
    > on the NCP Arpanet
    > ...
    > PDP11 (MOS):  11
    > PDP11 (MINITS); 10

Hi, which host table was this that you're looking at?

I'm pretty sure there was no MINITS NCP ('NCP' in the sense of 'Initial
Connection Protocol (ICP)' and 'ARPANET Host-to-Host Protocol (AHHP)' - see
below). There was _certainaly_ no MINITS machine on the ARPANET at MIT (the
birthplace of MINITS).

To confirm, I looked at a major MINITS source repository, here:

    https://github.com/PDP-10/its/tree/master/src/mits_s

and saw nothing like that. (Not even an 1822 interface driver.)

If you look there, you _will_ see things labelled 'NCP', but this is just a
terminological affliction among the CHAOS people, to whom 'NCP' apparently
meant 'protocol implementation' or 'network code'.

Also, implementations of the 'Host-to-IMP Protocol (HIP)' are _not_ NCP
either; there was an HIP implementation in the C Gateway, but that was
as IP router, one that could connect to an IMP.

IF IT DOESN'T HAVE AHHP, IT"S NOT NCP.


Also, I was intimately familiar with MOS, and neither of the two earliest
applications that ran on it (the TIU, and the Port Expander, both of which I
have the source code for) had any NCP. I looked at a lot of the MOS 'NCP"
listings in a old host table (see here:

  https://gunkies.org/wiki/Talk:Network_Control_Program

for details) and concluded that the MOS 'NCP' entries were all 'confused'.


    > From: Clem Cole

    > I was under the impression, that you folks at MIT did a ChaosNet
    > interface, IIRC, so there may have been some sort of conversion on
    > your LAN, but I really doubt there was a real NCP running.

The AI Lab did both i) a LAN called CHAOS (4 Mbit/seccond CSMA-CD over CATV
cable) and ii) a protocol family callled CHAOS (which later ran over XDI
Ethernet). I'm not sure that any of it has any relvance to what's under
discussion here.

    > But there was a Rand stack around the same time and III think
    > Holmgren ended up at UCSB after his time at UICI. Im fairly sure there
    > was cross polinartion but I don't know how much.

I looked through my V6 Unix NCP, but although there were some RAND #ifdefs, I
didn't see anything about Rand (except that the MMDF is noted as being based
on something done at Rand). I retain the distinct impression that all V6 Unix
NCP machines were running some descendant of the UIUC code. NOSC seems to have
served as a distro center at one point, see:

  https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/new/dist.log

but I can't tell who they were sending it too.

(We never tried to get it running at MIT since we were out of IMP ports.
By the time we got another IMP, we had IP running on the -11 and
NCP was done anyway.)

As for UCB, there are a bunch of UCBUFMOD #ifdef's, not sure what that
was about.


    > As for other NCPs, PARC had MAXC on the net, but I thought it had
    > originally a DG Nova front end that was replaced with an Alto. 

No, Maxc1 had a Nova, Maxc2 had an Alto.


    > From: Paul Ruizendaal

    > they started with 32V in the Fall of 1979, and ported UIUC's NCP code
    > to it

Thanks for straightening that out. I had a vague memory that there were a
few VAXen that ran NCP, but wasn't sure.

    > 2. Note that the BBN TCP worked over NCP as its primary transport.

Your terminology is confused. TCP _never_ ran 'on' NCP; they were
_alternative_ protocol stacks on top of IHP (on the ARPANET). No
AHHP, no NCP.

    > The driver is still there if you look

That acc.c is a driver for the ACC 1822 interface; it includes bits of IHP
("Try to send 3 no-ops to IMP") but I don't think it includes the complete IHP.
There are other BSD 1822 device drivers, e.g.:

  https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.11BSD/sys/pdpif/if_sri.c

That's the BSD2.11 Stanford/SRI 1822 device driver.

	Noel


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