[Info-vax] Reading Gordon Bell's VAX strategy document

[Dan Cross]

In article <944e6c54-4d47-4bf8-a1c5-736f594cac9cn at googlegroups.com>,
Neil Rieck  <n.rieck at bell.net> wrote:
>[snip]
>But for me, DEC's hatred for C, UNIX and TCPIP was just plain stupid since 16-bit PDP and 32-bit VAX were responsible for creating ARPAnet.
>https://neilrieck.net/links/cool_computer.html#internet
>Working on a VAX, once Bill Joy had rewritten all the new libraries in C, they raced from university to university. 

This is surprising to me.  My sense was always that there was
more done on the ARPANET with the PDP-10 than the -11, though
there were certainly a lot of PDP-11 hosts in the early days.
Still, I'd put the PDP-10 as more responsible for ARPANET than
the -11.

Certainly, once 4.1c BSD got TCP/IP and that escaped to
universities, Unix on VAX (and then whatever BSD was ported to;
Sun for instance got TCP/IP from Berkeley) became dominant on
the Internet.

>Back in 1992, I was working on a VAX-6000 when my employer asked me to install a TCP/IP stack. We were instructed to buy the software from
>Process Software because DEC's product was still considered experimental. Once on TCPware, we stuck with that product on VAX and Alpha. We
>would have stayed with it for Itanium but since TCPware didn't support IPv6 we migrated to MultiNet.

In some respects, I think that DEC's vision for the world was in
fact too early: highly networked, workstations, terminals and
hosts all interconnected.  It was quite compelling, but just a
tad too early to pick up TCP/IP etc.

	- Dan C.