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

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2023-09-28 21:59, Dan Cross wrote:
> 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.

I have obviously no idea. But one also have to be careful that DECnet 
don't get mixed in here, since there is also an NCP there. And Ultrix 
talked DECnet on VAXen. Not sure when that came about, though...

   Johnny