On 06/10/2014 01:37 PM, James Knott wrote:
On 06/10/2014 01:00 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:
Networking wasn't available to them in those days. Well, OK, there was UUCICO/UUCP over serial lines, store and forward of files, but not the kind of networking that would allow file systems to be shared.
Ethernet wasn't commercially available until 1980[1]. I'm sure DEC had other tweaks for letting machines cooperate but I don't recall them being used in even V6 and V7, for which I wrote many device drivers.
Actually, networking was available then. ARCnet was announced in 1977 and I used to work on a network that first saw use in the late '60s. I worked on some Collins C8500 computers in the Air Canada reservation system, starting in early 1978. It used an 8 Mb/s time division multiplexing (TDM) ring. An older version, running 2 Mb/s was available in the late '60s. The devices were assigned time slots in which to transmit and the receive would listen to that time slot. That network was used to connect tape stands, disk drives and more to the CPU. It even supported inter-CPU communications. So, "file sharing" over a network was certainly available by the time Unix was created.
Indeed. And SNA dates back to 1974. But I was dealing with the specific case of those poor guys at Bell labs who were finessing budgets to get a PDP-11 to play with, not a fully financed mainstream development project with ample funding that could draw on leading edge technology from any vendor, pick and choose. In fact the roots of UNIX go back to 1969 and a scavenged PDP-7 ... http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org