On 07/31/2016 11:27, Douglas Taylor wrote: > On 7/31/2016 2:44 AM, Graham Reid wrote: >> >> They were just networked, it wasn't a cluster. > > Do you remember if the networking software was part of VMS 5.5 or was it > a third party? I seem to remember third party TCPIP software, > Multiware, etc.
If he meant they just used DECNET, then it basically came with the OS. You might have actually paid extra for it in a commercial setting - I only dealt with educational or hobbyist licensing, and it was included in those instances. By this time I think DEC had released their Ultrix Connection (UCX) TCP/IP and utilities product. It combined the protocol stack, some services and network utilities, and things like a ported Berkeley-style C shell (/bin/csh). Using that last was a mildly odd experience... They later replaced that with TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS. As Bill Degnan pointed out, the "hot ticket" commercial TCP/IP stack in the VMS 5.x era was MultiNet. There was the older CMU/IP package that everybody seemed to want to get off of as soon as something else was available. Process Software had TCPware, which I never encountered in the wild. And of course The Wollongong Group offered a TCP/IP stack along with Eunice (Unix emulator). --S.
