> On Mar 12, 2016, at 2:36 PM, Bill Cunningham <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> What I meant was that I remember on early PCs using an rs232-c line for using
> the old BBSes and compuserve before it was an ISP. 10 cents a minute. I had
> several modems 300, 1200 and 2400 baud modems.
>
> These even older machines may have had hookups within a company. Even one
> building connecting 5 or so machines. Serial would've worked fine. And was
> what was used. I was thinking with maybe 4-5 PDP8s a company would use some
> kind of networking. Perhaps not back then. I was only aware of pdp11 and vax
> being "network possible". I guess I was wrong.
Networking has been around for quite a while, though early on it tended to be
more limited. For example, the University of Illinois PLATO system had its own
network (between Urbana, IL and Minneapolis, the CDC headquarters) with locally
designed hardware and a truly bizarre programming interface. DEC was pretty
early with DECnet, but before DECnet learned about routing, Typeset-11 had it
(around 1977). IBM mainframes in airline reservation systems had networks of
some sort (BISYNC? HDLC? I don't remember). And so forth.
DEC was perhaps the first to make the specs open in the sense that others could
implement from them. Industry standard protocols followed -- Ethernet is an
early example. And both ARPAnet and OSI (and, to some extent, X.25 and related
protocols) brought "official" standards, as distinct from "open" industrial
standards, into prominence.
paul
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