On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 10:08:40AM -0400, Mouse wrote: > > 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.)
*cough* 2^16 addresses for a large corp these days will just get you some howling laughter. Depending on what the company does, it might be enough for the desktops & their support environment, but not even remotely enough for the datacenters ... > 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. IP won over OSI *hualp* and whatever else insanity was out there because it a) works, b) is reasonably simply to implement (yes, I know, a full up, modern TCP/IP stack is anything but trivial, but the basics are not that crazy) and comes with a rather low level of designed-in complexity. Just compare SMTP and the OSI equivalent, X.400 ... yikes. > But the real shining star of DECnet/VMS was not the protocols, but the > ground-up integration into the OS. Which in modern UNIX systems is also there for TCP/IP. A modern UNIX type OS is pretty much unthinkable without a fully integrated TCP/IP stack. Yes, I'm aware of Coherent and their TCP/IP stack being an option, but even in the 90s I considered this to be a bad joke. Kind regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison