[Info-vax] DECnet use in today's world, was: Re: Tangent about DECnet versions.

[gsumnr at gmail.com]

HP decided to end DECnet's development back around 2004/2005, so pretty much anything since that point has been either a bug fix, or an adaptation to conform with modern requirements of a paying customer. 

Current deployment numbers would be nearly impossible as many of the running systems are probably in isolated environments where the machines just continue to crank away with the "admins" having little or no knowledge about them, so things are just left alone. Back in the day, we had machines run for several years without a reboot, and then the reboots were often required by an update, facility maintenance or just out of posterity to make sure they would come back up if there was a future outage.

I worked on the DECnet development team in operations support back in the late 90's and early 2000's, and before that 10 years in the networking development group. It's great to see the arguments being tossed back and forth on this thread as to the resiliency and flaws of DECnet, especially keeping in mind that it's 35+ years running and hasn't had and significant development in so long a period of time. 

Having endured the support nightmares of TCP/IP back in the late 80's and early 90's, it is rewarding to see that the standards DECnet, set 3 decades ago, have kept the bar so high for TCP/IP's eventual maturity.