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

--
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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