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	id E0vYbjj-0007k5-00; Fri, 13 Dec 1996 10:49:27 -0700
To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
Subject: Re: talk and talkd 
Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD hackers), mgessner@aristar.com
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 13 Dec 1996 10:15:42 +0100."
		<199612130915.KAA17346@uriah.heep.sax.de> 
References: <199612130915.KAA17346@uriah.heep.sax.de>  
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1996 10:49:27 -0700
From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
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In message <199612130915.KAA17346@uriah.heep.sax.de> J Wunsch writes:
: ytalk is supposed to speak the Sun protocol as well (including the
: required byte order changes Sun was so proud to forget).

True enough, but that's not FreeBSD's talk :-).

All this started back in BSD 4.2 on the vax when they designed a
protocol that worked great if you were talking to other vaxen.  Then
Sun ported talk to their machine, and the size of the message changed,
but it was still in host byte order.  There are hacks in Sun's talkd
to swap bytes when talking to a VAX, but I don't think that they
really work (could be wrong).

Then in BSD 4.3 they came up with an architecture neutral protocol
that was always in network byte order, had good, compiler friendly
byte alignment in its structures.  Sun never picked up these changes
:-(.

Warner