> DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also > proprietary, seldom used,
I think it is only semi-proprietary. I've seen open documentation that at the time (I don't think I have it handy now) I thought was sufficient to write an independent implementation, both for Ethernet and for serial lines. However, IIRC it also has a fairly small hard limit on the number of hosts it supports. I don't remember exactly what the limit is; different memories are handing me 10, 12, and 16 bits as the address size, but even the highest of those is sufficient for at most a large corporation. (Maybe it was 6 bits of area number and 10 bits of host number within each area? I'm sure someone here knows.) Perhaps if DEC had enlarged the address space (somewhat a la the IPv4->IPv6 change) and released open-source implementations, it might have been a contender. For all I know maybe they've even done that, but now it's much too late to seriously challenge IP's hegemony. But the real shining star of DECnet/VMS was not the protocols, but the ground-up integration into the OS. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B