[Info-vax] An alternative history of computing

[David Jones]

On Friday, July 23, 2021 at 8:00:16 AM UTC-4, gah4 wrote:
> I don't know about openness, but I remember stories from the early 
> VAX days on how expensive it was. Expensive enough that people 
> would not network VAX systems because of the price. 
> 
> Patents (if any) would have expired by now, though.

The first optical fibre backbone for the OSU campus network used
Proteon routers that supported DECnet as one of the protocols. Aside from
being slow, the option was very expensive. After a couple years, we dropped
DECnet from the contract and the backbone became TCP/IP only.