[HECnet] Re: A milestone

What 'twenex' people would these be?  Mark Crispin kind of held that community together and since he's passed, I don't believe I've had the opportunity to encounter many former systems programmers, which kind of surprises me. Getting a 20 on HECnet is easy enough (forgetting what "easy" might mean for the moment), but their care and feeding is another matter entirely.  The default software assumes a trained staff and has to be configured to lessen that dependence.  Again, not hairy, just batch jobs and ...  Well, I have yet to tot up the number of changes I've needed to make and, thus far, they have been substantial. There was also a fair amount of antipathy in that nobody would seem to care to understand why you would want DECnet if you had TCP/IP.  So finding a 20 hacker who can do DECnet was fairly hit and miss.  I certainly would not have been able to chase down some of the problems that I have without Johnny's prodigious talents as well as other people here familiar with the protocol. Although MRC did know some of DECnet, he didn't know it like he knew other areas.  I don't recall him publishing a DECnet fix on Tops-20-Wizards that he himself had done.  He certainly did take and publish changes as well as adding DECnet transport for the SMTP system.  Tops-10 hackers are even more rare as TCP/IP was never a DEC product; people apparently wrote their own IP stacks, as far as I am aware. Apparently not all 36 bit hardware will do DECnet.  I can't remember exactly, but I believe the network interfaces on some Toad's can not have their MAC addresses programmatically changed (anybody know this?)  I do know that one developer at XKL told me that DECnet was no longer in their monitor and he didn't know if they could even assemble it anymore.  I was surprised at that, but didn't think to follow up at the time. And if you're going to run actual KL hardware...  Well, God bless you, but do bring your wallet because you're going to need it, if for nothing else then the electricity, even if you are using CompuServe's power supplies.   And the hardware was gigantic wire-wrap backplanes which could sometimes be mysteriously cantankerous for days for no readily apparent reason although it was usually reliable enough for the times It's possible that these museums don't have adequate volunteer staff to keep up with those kinds of things.  Maybe I'll volunteer after I get PANDA II pushed out.  I'm just writing up the release notes for Kermit-20/NRT, so I want to get back to winding the rest of my DECnet fixes up and then put something out.