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

[Dan Cross]

In article <7wh6nehycy.fsf at junk.nocrew.org>,
Lars Brinkhoff  <lars.spam at nocrew.org> wrote:
>Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> 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.
>
>NCP and TCP operated in parallel on the ARPANET for a while.  The
>Internet Protocol Transition Workbook from November 1981 encouraged new
>hosts to only implement TCP, not NCP, and says at that point there were
>TCP-only hosts.  On several occasions during 1982, NCP was temporarily
>blocked, but TCP was allowed.  What happened on flag day was that NCP
>was permanently blocked.
>
>So what I was wondering was: were there any VAXen talking NCP, or did
>they jump straight to TCP?  I'd like to see evidence, not handwaving.

This came up on the TUHS list back in 2021 (you were on the
thread, Lars).  That pointed to this:

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-Vax-TCP/history

Which stronly implies that there was some "NCP" in VAX Unix
sometime in 1980.  Whether that was the Network Control Protocol
or just an affectation for "networking code" (as implied by Noel
Chiappa in the TUHS thread) is unknown.

	- Dan C.