Tops-10 and Tops-20 both speak NICE, so you can do something like:

NCP>telL TOMMYT:: shoW knOWN ciRCUITS
NCP>
13:42:02     NCP
        Request # 192 Accepted
NCP>
13:42:02     NCP

Request # 192; Show Known Circuits Summary Completed

Circuit     State                  Loopback    Adjacent
                                     Name        Node
NI-0-0      On                                2.522 (VENTI2)
NI-0-0                                       2.1023 (A2RTR)

One problem for Tops-20 is that it only speaks DECnet over a DN20 (via a DTE), an NI or a CI.  For the CI, you would see those nodes in the cluster.  However, since--by hardware--all CI nodes adjacent, this is perhaps of limited use.  For the NI, you get the the hosts on the Ethernet, so you can see that TOMMYT:: knows about VENTI::, which is where I executed the command from.  However, this is of limited utility.  Finally, as I recall, the last release of MCB on a DN20 only spoke Phase III, so I wasn't clear of what utility this might be.

A Tops-10 node appears to be able to have separate connections via a KDP, viz:

NCP>tell venti:: shoW knOWN ciRCUITS
NCP>
13:42:30     NCP
        Request # 194 Accepted
NCP>
13:42:31     NCP

Request # 194; Show Known Circuits Summary Completed

Circuit     State                  Loopback    Adjacent
                                     Name        Node
KDP-0-0     On                                 2.99 (SIMILE)

However, I don't know how useful that would be, either as I think the number of KDP's may be limited, perhaps to two (?)  Unfortunately, the real problem is that neither NICE knows much about areas.  It would appear that this is not implemented.  From VENTI2::

NCP>shoW arEA 2

13:43:06     NCP

Request # 188; Show Area Summary Failed, Unrecognized component,
Entity = Area

NCP>tell TOMMYT:: shoW arEA 2

13:40:14     NCP
        Request # 189 Accepted

13:40:14     NCP

Request # 189; Show Area Summary Failed, Unrecognized component,
Entity = Area

NCP>tell VENTI:: shoW arEA 2

13:40:46     NCP
        Request # 190 Accepted

13:40:46     NCP

Request # 190; Show Area Summary Completed
  No Information
I forget what area information Tops-20 knows about.  As I recall from the last time I looked at the Phase IV router code (ROUTER.MAC), it does handle a Router Hello message, but I think it only looks for its own area to make adjacency determinations.  I can't remember what it does with other areas, if anything.

In any event, there are two problems with discovering more about this.  The first is that there is no JSYS interface to the router database, so you'd have to PEEK%/XPEEK% the monitor to get this information.  That's kind of gross and you'd probably have concurrency issues.  Second, the source to the NICE (NML) processor was never released, so even if I did modify the NODE% JSYS or create an AREA% JSYS to fetch the information, I couldn't get the goodies to anyone.

I'm not above doing the JSYS work, but writing a NICE from scratch, or adapting the Phase II source that I have is a fair bit of work.  I'm sure I'd have a lot of fun with that, but I have a number of projects I need to wind up, first.

On 9/10/22 9:37 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

...

If you have a machine that talks NICE, you can examine for both VMS, RSX and PyDECnet, what the next hop towards an area is.