12 Mar
2023
12 Mar
'23
8:34 p.m.
On Mar 12, 2023, at 10:53 AM, Robert Armstrong
<bob(a)jfcl.com> wrote:
Someone was doing some work on it, I don't know how far that has come at this point.
Judging by some on-line documents, DECnet/8 was originally Phase I, and that is entirely
incompatible with later versions. The trouble is that it has a rather different NSP
protocol, so applications can't talk to Phase II or later. It would take an actual
NSP protocol translator to fit the two together.
It may be that there also exist Phase II DECnet/8 bits; if so those could be put onto
HECnet. Presumably they don't request intercept, so any communication to
non-neighbors would require Poor Man's Routing.
paul
Johnny Billquist <bqt(a)softjar.se> wrote:
The sources for DECNET-8 can be found. And you need to run RTS-8 for it.
And it can only talk DDCMP, so you need a serial line connection.
The manuals for the whole thing can also be found online. But there is
very little beyond the basic framework. You were expected to write your
own tasks that the communicated over DECnet under RTS-8.
Exactly - there are no applications for DECnet-8, not even the "standard"
ones. There's no FAL, no NML, no CTERM/RTERM, nothing. If you want it to do anything
you have to write an RTS application to do that.
Also it's not clear to me that DECnet-8 was ever actually "finished". I
don't think DEC ever got around to actually selling it, and I've never heard an
example of anyone getting it working.