[Info-vax] DECnet Phase IV, licencing and old VMS versions

[Paul Sture]

On 2016-11-18, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
> On 2016-11-18, Dirk Munk <munk at home.nl> wrote:
>
>> It always was a separate layered available in two versions, end-node and 
>> with routing enabled.
>>
>> In the beginning it would have been distributed on tape, and you would 
>> have installed it with the vmsinstall procedure.
>
> Thanks. I suppose the next question would be when was DECnet added to
> the base VMS installation kits. Was that with VMS 5.0 and the LMF ?

That's what I'm trying to remember.  I definitely recall DECnet being
pulled into the base distribution at some point.  I'm pretty sure that
when that first arrived, you still needed a distribution tape[1] to
install it, but that tape really only contained an enabling key for
either an end node or routing licence.

My 5 cent betting piece is on V4.0 or thereabouts, for that's when
clustering officially arrived.

>From "VAX/VMS Twentieth Anniversary" (vmsbook.pdf), this plus a bit
more arrived with V4 in September 1984:

VAX V4 September 1984

- VAXclusters
- Connection manager
- Distributed lock manager
- Distributed file system (F11BXQP)

One feature I immediately latched on to was the ability to do a 

    SET HOST 0/LOG=filespec 

which worked even when you didn't have a DECnet licence, plus things
like f$parse which could handle full filespecs including nodename, which
you could also test without a DECnet licence.  This was handy when your
development machine didn't have anything to connect to via DECnet yet.
:-)

> I'm trying to understand how long DECnet Phase IV, as we know it
> today, has been in existence.

Although VAXcluster et al were officially introduced at V4.0, various
pieces of that infrastructure were arriving in the later V3.n releases,
and undoubtedly early adopters were seeing bits the rest of us didn't.

-- 
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