[Info-vax] Rethinking DECNET ?

[Paul Sture]

On 2014-08-31, Neil Rieck <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
> DECnet-V wasn't bloated although it was the first true 7-layer
> OSI-compliant stack (IIRC). TCP/IP pretends to be 7-layer but is is
> really four although this has not proved to be a problem.

As I just pointed out in another post, Phase V did consume too many
resources on the VAXen available when it was introduced.

> Everyone knows that phase-4 only supports 64,449 nodes but no company
> other than DEC ever bumped into this limit.

Times change.  Google, Amazon etc have hundreds of thousands of systems
available to throw at a particular problem.  Major corporations in other
businesses definitely have thousands...

> Now for some reason I don't understand, phase-5 uses a completely
> different CLI. So the actual reason why phase-5 never got popular was
> because customers were putting off learning a new CLI until they hit the
> 65k limit.

The CLI *was* the learning curve in Phase-V. :-)

The Phase-IV NCP commands were far more suitable for a typical VMS shop
where a system manager would do an initial network setup and then largely
forget about it until the once or twice a year a new device got added.

With NCP you can spend a little time digging around the help and that
knowledge comes back.  This is not so with Phase V's NCL; it was always
more suitable for someone doing networking on a full time basis.

-- 
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
If you own a jackhammer, every problem looks like hours of fun