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

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Dan Cross writes:
> 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.

Thanks!  Yes, that would be unknow.  That is almost an optimum point in
time for ambiguity as to what NCP means.  DECnet, Chaosnet, and IBM also
picked up the term as roughly equivalent to "network stack".  So this
BBN VAX NCP could be either the old Arpanet NCP, or a new TCP stack.

As per the 1981 Transition book, there were already TCP-only hosts on
the Arpanet, implying that some sites developed and deployed TCP well
before that.  I get the sense that everyone was aware the switch was
going to happen and new development was towards TCP.  But I don't know
the exact timeline.