On 03/08/2015 19:56, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 03/08/15 18:29, Huge wrote:
On 2015-08-03, Robin wrote:
Tim Streater wrote:
In article . com,
dennis@home wrote:

On 03/08/2015 09:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

The internet was mostly BUILT out of Unix computers. Networking is
in its blood.

When it consisted of three machines that was true.

Networking came much later than Unix.

Unclear. I first saw unix running on a PDP-11/45 at DEC Western
Research Lab (Palo Alto) in 1977. Earlier than that, at CERN, we had
been building networks, based on our own hardware and software and
using coax cable. These were point to point links up to a few km and
running (for the shorter links) at up to 5Mbps.

Xerox produced XNS, which is what the Altos and Stars used over early
ethernet in the early 80s. AIUI, that might have become the wider
networking standard except that Xerox refused to release the specs for
some of the higher networking layers. Also by this time the unix boys
were busy creating IP, which then took over from XNS because it was
free and available with unix, and people had started writing IP stacks
for other machines, such as VAXes and some IBM systems.

But mail and file transfer had been going on using ad-hoc methods
anyway for some years.

I thought Ethernet was invented in the early 70s at Palo Alto.

It was, initially 3Mb/s, referred to as "research Ethernet" at Xerox. But
what protocol(s) ran over it were a different matter. At one time there
were a number of competing ones; X25, XNS, IPX/SPX (which was related
to XNS), AppleTalk, DECNet. Mostly gone now & replaced by TCP/IP.

Not sure X25 wasn't an entirely different wire level protocol. You are
correct with the others though.

I remember getting TCP/IP to work over X25 and indeed token ring...






I remember the first ethernet I ordered and installed used ISO
protocols, TCP was just a labs thing.