Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 22:30:59 -0800 (PST) From: "Bruce R. Montague" <brucem@mail.cruzio.com> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Van Jacobson's network stack restructure Message-ID: <200602020630.k126Uxf5000490@mail.cruzio.com>
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Hi, hope this isn't too off-topic, but it's a reasonably hackery follow-up re a minor historical question instigated by Van Jacobson's Slide 6, which contains the following point: "First TCP/IP stack done on Multics (1980)" Presumably this means the first version of the specific TCP/IP stack with the architecture that evolved/forked/more-or-less-directly-was-reimplmented to become the BSD kernel-resident TCP/IP stack. 1. Was this first Multics stack written in PL/1? Based on literature/web, etc., the very first implementaton of TCP was a 24 Kbyte BCPL program written by Richard Karp at Stanford for the ELF operating system (this was in Cerf's lab). In 1975 the first test of TCP outside a single lab occured when a link was established between this stack and a TCP program of some sort written in Babbage by Frank Deignan on a very small PDP-9 at University College London. BBN did a 3rd independent BCPL implementation of TCP under (user-level) TENEX. All 3 TCP stacks first inter-operated in 1977. TCP was split into TCP and IP in 1979. The sliding window protocol comes from Pouzin's Cyclades system (which became operational in France sometime between 1972-1974; Cerf and Kahn acknowledged the influence of Cyclades on TCP); Pouzin had worked at MIT on CTSS and coined the term "shell". 2. Was the Multics stack based on one of the BCPL stacks? 3. Does anyone know anything about the UCL Babbage TCP implmentation, or anything about the Babbage language? (I assume it was a structured assembly language, similar to PL/360 or SUPMAC). 4. Does anyone know anything about Frank Deignan? Just curious, have tried to find out information about this for awhile. Thanks in advance if you know anything relating to any of this. - bruce
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