2 Aug
2022
2 Aug
'22
10:44 p.m.
On 2022-08-02 17:49, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
'Real' is an unfortunate word.
If by 'Real', you mean commercial applications that people pay money
for, then I wasn't aware of the DECnet market being very large. I'd
love to be contradicted on this...
I think there was a fair number of applications once upon a time. All
gone, and have been gone quite a while now. Rewind more than 30 years
for that one...
For hobbyist's some DEC OS's never came with a
DEC sanctioned TCP/IP
stack. So if you don't have DECnet, you can't realistically talk to
Tops-10 and some others. Probably OS/8, /maybe/ RSTS and whatever
version of RSX you have that Johnny has gotten to. Others?
The only OSes with a DEC sanctioned TCP/IP in addition to DECnet would
be TOPS-20, VMS and Ultrix.
DECnet only would be OS/8, RT-11, RSTS/E, RSX and Tops-10, I think.
Of course, TCP/IP do exist for both RT-11 and RSX. But not from DEC.
KERMIT is always another option if wanting to talk to systems...
Talking to these old operating systems has been a gold
mine for finding
bugs in Tops-20, supporting CUSPs, Galaxy and DAP. This is nothing
against those programmers, they just weren't given the time to fully
productize some very interesting features.
:-)
I'd prefer to have DECnet in Linux for that
reason. However, I don't
recall that I ever came across a very stable version of latd and the
client (whose name I've forgotten). Somebody on this list worked on
them I think.
DECnet for Linux was ever only reverse engineered and tested against
VMS. It can act funny against other OSes.
LAT have one serious bug that I've fixed. But I've not distributed my
fix to anyone. I know, I should. But it's not been high on my priority
list, and I don't even know who to contact about it.
Running the Linux LAT against at least RSX never works for very long
before it stops and aborts.
I haven't tried any other OSes, so it might be more or less of a problem
on different OSes depending on their side as well, but Linux LAT are
mismanaging credits leading to flow control errors.
I guess if anyone here is interested, I can always just send a diff for
the fix(es). And others can apply it and recompile...
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol