Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 23:12:30 -0800 (PST) From: "Bruce R. Montague" <brucem@mail.cruzio.com> To: Frank-Deignan@cfl.rr.com Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Van Jacobson's network stack restructure Message-ID: <200611300712.kAU7CUSe000438@mail.cruzio.com>
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Hi, Frank. re: > http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-February/015365.html > > Who's calling? :-) > > Frank The original email to which you link above occurred in a discussion regarding the performance, architecture, evolution (or somesuch) of the FreeBSD network stack. The FreeBSD network stack is arguably about the most direct descendent of the TCP/IP stack that was done (forked from a BBN stack, I guess) at UC Berkeley. One reason the UCB (and FreeBSD) stack is of interest is because it essentially became the "reference implementation" for the modern TCP/IPv4 implementation. In university networking classes, noting that the first TCP link outside of a single lab was between Stanford and London (and thus that the "Internet" has always been "International") makes a good story. Unfortunately it is hard to answer the invariable follow-up questions. I found very little info available the last time I looked (a few years ago). But maybe I missed the obvious. Did you do the UCL PDP-9 implementation on the first link? Was it a stand-alone program? What did it do? Kind of a ping? A test or performance program to debug things? What was the "network device" like? Did this program evolve, or was the PDP-9 just too small? Was your TCP written in Babbage? Was Babbage an assembler or a "structured assembly" language with control flow and expressions? Is there any published doc on this language (or programming environment)? How did you work with the Stanford folks? Was the work with the protocol done to a "wire spec", or did you look at their implementation? Did you work with their BCPL version of TCP, or hand-port BCPL to Babbage assembly code? etc. etc... Was anything written up and published? Where? (I did try to contact UCL, to no avail.) Alas, all to often today if it's not electronically indexed it's as if it didn't exist. Was this info classified at the time? (I saw somewhere that the big push for a portable standard digital network link to Britain was that Norway happened to have an existing seismic-monitoring network close to a particularly interesting Arctic test site... is this true?) Sorry to go on at length with so many questions. There was some nice information about a new study of the Antikythera mechanism today, surely the mysterious PDP-9 and it's Babbage programming environment can yield a few clues! :) Please correct me anyone if I've got something wrong. - bruce
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