On 24 Aug 2021 at 08:28p, BadOPCode pondered and said...
I'm sorry, but the assertion that KA9Q NOS had much influence on ether the Berkeley Unix TCP/IP stack or Winsock is just not based
in fact.
I'm sorry but your wrong with your assertion. I was never arguing with
you EVER about Phil's involvement with BSD TCP stack. Just that it's
very possible he could have shared info or snippets of code as it was a popular thing to do than.
What, precisely, is the assertion that you claim I made that is wrong?
How could a program Phil Karn wrote for CP/M in 1985 have influenced a
VAX Unix code base shipped in 1983? Recall that the genesis of this conversation were claims that a) the first TCP/IP stack on a microcomputer
was written by a Karn (not true; the first was PC/IP, by Karn's own
admission), b) that Karn worked at NEC at the time (not true; he worked
either at Bell Labs in Illinois or at Bellcore by then), c) that "KA9Q
NOS" is "all over" the TCP/IP stacks shipped with BSD Unix and with
Windows (there is no evidence to support that assertion). Sure, the BSD
TCP/IP implementation has been updated over the years, but bear in mind
it was the reference implementation and by that time, people working on
such things had access to the Internet, had had access to the ARPANET
before that, had access to UUCP and would have been attending multiple
relevant conferences per year.
As far as old ways of code sharing. I was a kid but I remember it. It
was mostly done mostly with print outs or rarely punch cards being
mailed.
Sorry, no. Work on Unix, the Internet, etc, was mostly being done
on networks by that point. In the limit, people were mailing around
magtapes (or hand-carrying them to conferences, such as Ken taking
a copy of Unix to Berkeley in 1975). But things like this were being
passed over UUCP and the ARPANET very early on.
Certainly, no one working on those systems were mailing around decks of
punched cards.
This is all well documented. I recommend Salus's book, "Twentyfive
Years of Unix": he speaks with most of the major players.
Who else remembers drawing and making cool things out of punch
cards? By mid-80's things had gone to mostly exchanging by mailing floppies. BUT large projects were usually still not distributed as
entire code bases and would still be just key pieces parts.
What you are describing was, perhaps, true in the microcomputer/hobbyist
world, but not on minicomputers and not in the research community.
The original BSD/MIT open source licensing was if you use this code
leave me out of it. Everyone was more concerned being fingered for damaging a corp or government mainframes than worried about getting
kudos. But everyone shared a lot up until a famous jackass from Seattle hit the scene and would claim he invented electrons if he could squeeze another dollar out of you.
Not quite. In the very early days, computers were all about the
hardware, and software was mostly an after thought; this is why the
very early IBM mainframe OS's are all publicly available: IBM gave
them away because they didn't see a value add. IBM started charging
for software when Amdahl got an injunction that basically said that
IBM had to support his software on their machines.
Unix is a more interesting story; the Bell system was a regulated
monopoly, and in exchange for their monopoly status they had to give
away their research artifacts for a "reasonable fee." This meant
that anyone from a university or research center could basically ask
for a copy for the cost of media and shipping, etc, though AT&T
retained the rights. This led to a rapid proliferation of Unix
on relatively inexpensive minicomputers in places like university
academic departments, which could now afford a computer of their
own (a mini was like 10x less than a mainframe).
By the time of the 7th Edition release (1979), AT&T was starting to
tighten up its licensing terms, hence why Lyons didn't do another
edition of his famous "papers" which described 6th Edition in detail.
The VAX was coming on the scene by then and it's proprietary operating
system, VMS, was proprietary, which was the norm at that point.
But BSD has recieved a lot of code share from
a lot of surprising players (yes even the jackass.)
Microsoft was an early Unix licensee, but I'm not aware of much, if
any, MSFT code that made it into BSD, at least not until post 4.3BSD,
when POSIX was really ramping up. MSFT was much more closely involved
with System V; SVR4 merged System V, Xenix, SunOS, and parts of BSD.
There are a smattering of SVR4 descendants still in use today (AIX,
HP/UX, and Solaris). Of those, only the Solaris descendants are
open source.
They just were rarely complete works like they are today.
Incorrect. By 3BSD, UCB was distributing a complete Unix
distribution to AT&T licensees. The usual pattern was to buy
a VAX without VMS, get a 32/V license from AT&T, and then
write to Berkeley for copy of BSD.
I really think Stallman was the first with GNU to really push the distributing of complete works.
No. GNU never distributed a complete system. Despite
Stallman's claims that it should be referred to as "GNU/Linux"
they never had a kernel until Linux came along and de facto
adopted the GNU utilities and environment. Before that, it
was common to install GNU software on commercial Unix (they
fixed a lot of bugs that existed in the code bases that made
up System V and BSD distributions).
IMHO. BSD and MIT ... hard to explain but it was all just a weird experiment to these guys. Like no really cared much of the overall
state things were in outside their systems. Not a fact, just the feeling
I got back than.
Sorry, that's not true; by the mid-1980s, Unix on minicomputers
and the emerging workstation market were a big economic factor
in the computer industry. Again, refer to Salus's book.
But anyways... the number of developers working on data
telecomunications was really small and everyone knew everyone and a lot of people loved sharing with each other information. So it's hard to say who the unsung contributors on the information and concept level of things for software made in the 80's.
I think you're mostly referring to microcomputers and hobbyist
development, which was very different.
Tons of code sharing both
snippets and complete works exploded with the advent of the BBS.
This is where a lot of folks commenting from the hobbyist perspective
get bogged down: there was a vibrant research community that predated
the BBS by a few decades that was doing serious work in this area,
but unless you were involved in that community, you probably didn't
know much about it. Sharing there often happened by papers published
in journals, code and patches shared by e.g. UUCP or the ARPANET,
and face-to-face interactions at conferences (never underestimate
the power of the hallway track).
Double that, when PC's got internet and not just terminals to mainframes on the internet.
Personal workstations started emerging in a serious way towards the
mid 1980s, and many of those were directly connected to the Internet,
well in advance of the mass introduction of PCs.
But as far as Phil Karn working at Berkeley writing their TCP
stack as an uncredited contributor... very much doubt that. And back than that is what it would have taken. To physically be there. But was
No, sorry, that's just wrong. As I've said, there was communication
via other means. As a research, Karn would have had access to much
greater facilities for such things than the average hobbyist.
he ever in a room with the Berkeley guys after a few beers which is ultimately what I was talking about... and I have no clue.
He certainly presented at conferences they attended. They definitely
added support for the KP87 retransmission algorithm to the Berkeley
TCP/IP stack. But, as I said before, that's qualitatively different
than KA9Q NOS being "all over" the BSD and Windows code.
BUT if you were to talk to the jackass from Seattle he invented the BSD socket stack right after he invented the operating system, GUI's and oxygen. ;)
No, Microsoft had to obey the terms of the BSD license; they credit
the UC regency for Winsock. Xerox invented the GUI as we know it from
both Apple and Microsoft.
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