[HECnet] Re: A milestone

I have been planning for a long time to post a small reflection when I reached 1000 nodes registered in the hecnet nodename database. This happened tonight. I think it is a pretty cool thing. There are now 1000 nodenames registered in this small hobby DECnet. I guess you could say it's actually not that small. However, I know that rather few machines are actually online, and it might even be that the majority of nodes registered have never been online. My guess is that maybe 5% of the registered machines are usually online. But I do not have any hard data to back this up. HECnet started out about 20 years ago from a desire I had to hook up a PDP-11 I had at home, to some machines at my university, using DECnet. At the time, I didn't have any TCP/IP for RSX, and the only way to get any kind of networking was to try and come up with some way of getting DECnet up. My first implementation basically just forwarded a serial port communication between two Unix machines. And on each end I then hooked that serial port into a PDP-11 running RSX, and used DDCMP for the actual DECnet link. This worked, but was obviously not that fast, as the serial ports were limited to 9600 bps. After a year or so, I figured I could instead write a small program that would forward ethernet packets. Using UDP I basically had the same property as a local ethernet, but it could be located somewhere pretty far away. From a DECnet point of view, it would appear as if they were on the same ethernet segment, while in reality they were nowhere near. As DECnet have pretty long timeouts on things, it turned out this worked without a hitch, and I could achieve much better throughput. Not long after that, the first other users were hooked up to HECnet as well. This was maybe around 2003 or so. Another data point is that there are 113 different persons that have one or more nodenames registered. Happy milestone, everyone, and thanks for being around.   Johnny