Probably I am now the worst person in the world to ask as to what is intuitive on Tops-20, what with being saturated with it and all.

Are you referring to the programming part or the user part?

If the latter, then what is so bad about @finger debellis@mim?  It's the same thing you'd use for email... I don't recall that our users complained about finger.  They did, however, find plenty of other things to point out.

If you want complicated, unintuitive and  bad to use, may I suggest trying to create a directory on ITS or deleting a file on MVS with JCL?

I must say - in this case TOPS-20 seems rather complicated, unintuitive and bad to use.

The user and hostname fields... Hmm. I'll clean that up on the RSX side. :-)

  Johnny

On 2024-07-21 04:02, Thomas DeBellis wrote:

I finally remembered the syntax to force transport.  After you aredone with whatever the host name is, you append a ".#" suffix followed by the name of the transport protocol.  Let's suppose there is a nickname defined in the SYSTEM:HOSTS.TXT file for MIM:: as follows:

HOST : 192.108.202.74 : MIM : PDP11 : RSX : TCP/TELNET,TCP/FTP,TCP/SMTP,TCP/FINGER :

So we can force a finger of user DEBELLIS to use a particular transport, as below.  In the output, the DCN: device is the DECnet active component (or client) and the TCP: device is for IP, where client or service are specified in the GTJFN% string.

*DECNET*

     FINGER>debellis@mim.#decnet
     [Fork FINGER opening DCN:MIM-117 for reading, writing]
     DEBELLIS
     Default directory: US00:[DEBELLIS]    CLI: DCL    SID: TDB
     Last seen May 21 2024 23:56:54 on RT0: from VENTI2::
     Logged on 8 times.
     No plan.

*INTERNET*

     FINGER>debellis@mim.#internet
     [Fork FINGER opening TCP:.30033145112-79;PERSIST:30;CONNECTION:ACTIVE for reading, writing]
     DEBELLIS
     Default directory: US00:[DEBELLIS]    CLI: DCL    SID: TDB
     Last seen May 21 2024 23:56:54 on RT0: from VENTI2::
     Logged on 8 times.
     No plan.

I did notice that the user and host name data appear to be written in fixed length fields, resulting in trailing spaces that were not trimmed.  This is unlike the other lines in the output. Not that it really matters; who is running 300 baud these days except for museums?

------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 7/20/24 7:27 PM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:

All too true, except that it isn't stupid, at least not in that particular regard.

As per my previous email, Finger uses HSTNAM to determine network transport, which has a default order, on my systems picking DECnet first.  I'm pretty sure there was a way to force the transport protocol, I just don't remember what the magic syntax is.

A number of system programs use HSTNAM to implement their protocols over multiple transports.  These include the mail system, the FTP client, finger and something else (I think).

------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 6/17/24 9:22 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

Ugh. That notions seems risky... How do you know you should be using DECnet and not IP if you say @mim?

After all, @mim is a perfectly valid IP address as well.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 2024-06-18 00:47, Thomas DeBellis wrote:

Updating the Tops-20 Finger client was simple enough, a table entry for DECnet and a small routine to build the JFN string, viz:

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