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

[Dan Cross]

In article <7w7co9ijmc.fsf at junk.nocrew.org>,
Lars Brinkhoff  <lars.spam at nocrew.org> wrote:
>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.

I, too, find it hard to imagine that a lot of effort would have
been put into a VAX NCP implementation since it was clear that
TCP/IP was coming, but as a stopgap or some special purpose?  I
could see it.

I found a copy of the hosts table from 1983:
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt/blob/master/pub/hosts/19830119/HOSTS.TXT

This lists a number of VAX systems that appear to have been
assigned "ARPANET host numbers", but they could also be "RCCnet"
numbers (I don't think I've ever heard of RCCnet).

This:
https://github.com/ttkzw/hosts.txt/blob/master/pub/hosts/19820615/SYSHST%3B%20HOSTS%20PRETTY
appears to show at several VAXen on ARPANET (BBNF running VMS at
01/05 and UCLA-SECURITY running Unix at 2/01, among others).

Again, it's not entirely clear if these are NCP-hosts, possibly
running TCP/IP, or what.  I do feel comfortable assuming they're
not running DECnet (or at least, that's irrelevant to them being
listed in these host tables).

	- Dan C.