HECnet: The Hobbyist DECnet Network

http://mim.stupi.net/hecnet

by salgernon • 4 years ago

48 9 4 years ago

mim.stupi.net

nazgulsenpai2• 4 years ago

Hugged to death?

mrlonglong• 4 years ago

Nope.

nazgulsenpai2• 4 years ago

Yeah seems fine now.

Semaphor• 4 years ago

Same for me, not sure what’s going on there. Getting timeouts both for this and for web.archive.org

pantalaimon• 4 years ago

It’s probably hosted on a MicroVAX

leetrout• 4 years ago

For those curious:

DECnet is a suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation. Originally released in 1975 in order to connect two PDP-11 minicomputers, it evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet

jws• 4 years ago

Back in the day before IP killed everything else, DECnet was nice. You got to use short names for connecting to remote hosts where IP uses port numbers. You could make a listener on a name without having “root” access to the machine. Because back then it was mostly shared machines.

But the biggest difference for me was that record boundaries survived the stream so all the “how am I going to frame this data” part of protocol design was already handled. You got to skip all the “newline delimits, except if you escape it, or maybe a CR counts or maybe it is ignored, or only ignored if next to a NL”, or its evil twin “a two byte integer precedes the data, in a byte order that might be reversed or not and if your machine is in the right order you will never realize you missed or included an extra byte order reverser”.

And more a VMS specific DECnet feature, all IO had completion routines so for high efficiency servers it was a lot like programming in a modern async environment with “.then()” style. (Thought they ran at an interrupt level rather like signal delivery in Unix, so you had to be a little careful. )

guenthert• 4 years ago

You could make a listener on a name without having “root” access to the machine.

You can do that with IP as well (just not the 'well known' ports <1024).

But the biggest difference for me was that record boundaries survived the stream so all the “how am I going to frame this data” part of protocol design was already handled.

You might want to look into RPC for IP then instead of HTTP.

tssva• 4 years ago

Back in the day before IP killed everything else, DECnet was nice.

As someone that used to work as a network engineer supporting IP, IPX, DECnet, Vines IP, and SNA over Ethernet, token ring, arcnet, FDDI, ATM, 100VG-Anylan, X.25, frame relay, ISDN and a variety of dedicated circuit types I am grateful that IP and Ethernet have killed almost everything else off. The network protocols were not always easy to have living together on the same network.

HECnet: The Hobbyist DECnet Network

Related Stories