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

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2023-09-28 08:09, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> Dan Cross wrote:
>>>> In fact, were there any [VAXen] at all on the ARPANET before the
>>>> 1983 flag day?
>>> Almost certainly.  The initial TCP/IP implementation work for Unix
>>> was being done at BBN at the time, and I imagine that meant VAXen
>>> connected to ARPANET.
> 
> I meant VAX machines talking the NCP protocol.
> 
>> Well, before flag day, ARPANET wasn't speaking TCP/IP...
> 
> Yet, there were experiments with TCP long before the flag day so it's
> not a 100% either/or situation.  I get the feeling (but I have no
> evidence handy) some subset of nodes got started using TCP before NCP
> was shut down.  On several occasions in 1982 (and maybe earlier?) BBN
> arranged for NCP "brown-outs" to encourage speedy development.

There were of course development, and testing done between machines and 
so on. But that was not "ARPANET". ARPANET was running NCP until flag 
day, when it officially switched to IP. And at some point after that, 
all of ARPANET because just the 10.* addresses on the Internet, and then 
ARPANET was turned off, and it was decided that 10.* should not exist on 
the Internet anymore...

   Johnny