On 3/8/23 8:14 PM, Robert Armstrong wrote:

  They're DECnet nodes, but they aren't "computers".  You can't do anything
with them except route messages.  Can't log in, edit files, compile
programs, play Adventure or Star Trek, nothing :)

As far as I am aware, all PANDA Tops-20 distributions have Advent.  I have an Algol version of Star Trek, but I have yet to track the authors down.

Finding out what a node can do has been done in different ways.  Tops-20 had TCP/IP as a DEC product far before other DEC offerings.  Not that you couldn't get it, just not from DEC.  If I'm remembering correctly, I believe one vendor was called Wollongong and maybe it was Australian.

The TCP/IP implementations had earlier and later versions of DNS.  HOSTS.TXT will tell you what services the node offers, but that had to be kept up to date and it eventually became infeasible.  I would imagine that DNS records could hold other bits of Interest, but I only have what kind of mail it will do.  The Tops-20 DNS (CHIVES) has records for both CHAOS nodes and IP, this is unremarkable since it comes from MIT.  I am maybe about one fourth of the way through putting in a DECnet record type.  For now, I've modified it to better support DECnet node numbers, which are not known by default.

I would imagine you could have entries for whether the node allows public access, anonymous transfer and I guess games.

  We have different goals - I'm not counting nodes, I'm counting general
purpose computing hardware.

I'm actually seeing 1,004 nodes defined.

SETNODE>LIST (node table) totAL (nodes defined in node tables)
    Total Unchanged nodes:   1004
 Total updates to perform:   NONE
    Total nodes to delete:   NONE
 Total words, shared text:   1813
       Total nodes mapped:   1004
Section mapped input file: TOMMYT:<SYSTEM>NODE-DATA.BIN.1;PROCESS-ONLY-JFN:26 ;UNRESTRICTED-READ
  Total file pages mapped:      4

I don't know how many nodes are actually up 24/7, but my 20's (TOMMYT::and VENTI2::) are, viz:

TOMMYT up for 21 Weeks, 6 Days, 21 Hours, 37 Minutes, 8 Seconds and 407 Milliseconds
VENTI2 up for 21 Weeks, 6 Days, 21 Hours, 27 Minutes, 20 Seconds and 773 Milliseconds