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Networking IT

DECnet Isn't Dead 375

Posted by timothy from the it's-living-with-disco dept.
Ronald Dumsfeld writes "The odds of folks under the age of 25 on Slashdot having heard of DECnet are pretty slim. This article over at Datamation gives some insight into people who've not given up on it. Poke around and find the documentation for the OSI-compliant version, or download the Linux version of the older DECnet IV and bask in the Security Through Obscurity."
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DECnet Isn't Dead More

DECnet Isn't Dead

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  • Wow (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zoloto ( 586738 ) *
    It's been ages since I've heard of that. I thought it was confirmed to be dead, unlike our BSD friends whom netcraft seems to confirm to some /.ers... :D
    • It's pining for the fjords!

  • TCP/IP license fees? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ZiZ ( 564727 ) * on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:13PM (#12996622) Homepage
    From TFA:

    IP, though, is the industry standard protocol. These days, everybody knows how to use TCP/IP. That means anyone also deploying DECnet has to license both protocols. The good news is that the DECnet fees are a bit less than those for TCP/IP.

    Did I miss something? So far as I know, the specifications for TCP, IP, and (most) assorted support protocols are openly avaliable, free of charge to implement, screw up, use and abuse. Is this suggesting DECnet fees involve someone paying you to use it? If that's the case, sign me up!

    • The implementation must be licensed. (Score:5, Informative)

      by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:20PM (#12996695)
      The OpenVMS implementation of TCP/IP and DECnet must be licensed seperately from the operating system. That is what they mean. The OpenVMS TCP/IP implementation costs less than the OpenVMS DECnet implementation.
      • The OpenVMS TCP/IP implementation costs less than the OpenVMS DECnet implementation.

        Are you sure about that? The article states exactly the opposite. Quoth the article "The good news is that the DECnet fees are a bit less than those for TCP/IP." I was just curious which statment is correct.

    • Re:TCP/IP license fees? (Score:5, Informative)

      by UseTheSource ( 66510 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:21PM (#12996702) Homepage Journal
      The specification, yes... The implementation, no. Last I worked on VMS, there was no "built in" TCP/IP stack. This had to be added on after the fact, usually in the form of a closed-source, proprietary implementation. (i.e. MultiNet).

    • Sure, the RFCs are free and the BSD networking code is free. This is a software license fee for the *implementation* of TCP/IP that runs on VAX/VMS. The mainframes and minis were a different world from today. You paid big bucks for everything. $$$$ for the OS, $$$$ for hardware with huge markups. In those days Microsoft was the cheaper alternative. You even had to pay extra for TCP/IP on Windows 3.1. Remember Trumpet Winsock?
      • I remember Trumpet winsock, and PC/NFS and OnNet. Back in the Windows 3.11 days you had to use these and if you wanted to run a TCP/IP stack and Novell you had to very carefully fine tune autoexec.bat and use strange driver software. SUN used to give away PCNFS for 10 UKP per copy to universities but I remember paying almost 150 UKP for OnNet, which gave you the TCP stack, a browser (based on Mosaic), telnet client and ftp client.

        Then Microsoft started giving away a TCP stack for Windows for Workgroups (or
        • Because you can reasonably (and IMHO, correctly) argue that a networking protocol stack is part of the job of an OS- to transfer data and control the network hardware. Display and rendering of data, such as a browser, is a different story.

  • Of course it isn't dead! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:14PM (#12996638)
    DECnet is often used these days for very mission critical applications. The firm I work for uses DECnet because it is the easiest and most reliable way for us to maintain our VAX and Alpha clusters. Indeed, it is by far the most superior form of networking out there for applications where the uptime must be literally 100%.

    We have had sales reps from various vendors come and suggest moving to a Windows 2003/PC setup (HAHA!) or towards a more UNIX/Linux-based setup. But we will stick with our DECnet-based VAX and Alpha clusters because they are known to work, and they work pretty damn well! But that's because it is amongst the finest of DEC engineering. That's the sort of engineering you just don't find these days.
    • I couldn't agree more. And anyone who wants to play with VMS can just hop over to OpenVMS Rocks and see how awesome it is for themselves.

      Hmmm... I had better contrib a bit to cover the bandwidth costs ;)

      -WS

    • Indeed, it is by far the most superior form of networking out there for applications where the uptime must be literally 100%.

      Not trolling, but genuinely curious as to what requires 100% up time? When I think along the lines of hospitals, they still have a mainly human workforce, banks close, and the military's systems would have, I would think, extensive redundancy built in in case of battle damage. So what am I not thinking of?

      • Online stores, or the worldwide sales operations of certain large corporations. They are open 24 hours, and even 30 seconds of downtime can mean the loss of tens of thousands of dollars in sales.

        We find that VMS running on VAX and Alpha systems and using DECnet proves to be the most reliable solution. These are rock solid systems that do not die.
      • Not trolling, but genuinely curious as to what requires 100% up time?
        I can tell you at least one thing of the top of my head that needs 100% uptime:

        The Telephone System (i.e. communication channels)
        • I worked support for a large telecom. I started a bug report and after a couple of days of working on it to no avail, I asked how urgent this was. They said it happened about once a day and each time a few thousand calls were dropped. But no big deal, it wasn't TOO urgent, and I could get to it when I wanted. I was stunned.
      • Finanical Services and Telecom are 2 big users of 100% uptime. Those stockmarkets and banks the world over have transactions going on 24/7 literally and downtime can cost millions. Telephones, etc also need to basically just work, all the time. Yes there are outages, but you don't want it to be from your switching or billing systems. To a lesser extent things like credit card companies and online stores. Though online vendors can often deal with 5 9's.
      • What about gambling sites? Especially around the superbowl. We have seen reports the cyberblackmail of these types of sites.

      • Re:Of course it isn't dead! (Score:4, Funny)

        by ettlz ( 639203 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @03:00PM (#12997085) Journal
        The software and hardware that drives my heart and lungs require 100% uptime.

      • Re:Of course it isn't dead! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by kerrle ( 810808 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @03:18PM (#12997265) Journal
        Oil Refineries.

        The Valero refinery down here uses VAX machines to monitor the gauges on the equipment all over the plant.

        Think about it - refineries don't have "downtime"...pretty much ever. Even when they're doing work on one part of the plant, the rest keeps going.

        And they can't miss data - for both safety and environmental reasons.

    • > DECnet is often used these days for very mission critical applications.

      So is TCP/IP, right?

      > We have had sales reps from various vendors come and suggest moving to a Windows 2003/PC setup (HAHA!) or towards a more UNIX/Linux-based setup.

      Well if you've got to spend a ton of money to migrate your apps that certainly doesn't make much sense, but one day you'll have to make that decision..
      Some clustering software for CPUs has architecture quite similar to what you have now - for example Veritas/Syman
    • i rember having a DEC PDP 11 in school. We had enough terminals for the entire class. I do not remember a single day when the computer and all terminals were not available. The same with the VAX in college.

      Contrast with the PCs of today when we often do not enough computers for the entire class because so many of then are broken. I am not advocating going back to big iron, but when one factors in the cost of redundancy to compensate for the unreliable PC, the PC solution is not nearly so cheap.

      • Amen.

        When I started college, my school had a vax mainframe that was slowly being phased out (the campus terminals were completely replaced by PCs about a year after I graduated).

        The VAX was always up and was a reliable connection for me and my hand-me-down 286 running Kermit over a simple serial connection to the ethernet jacks in the dorm rooms. While my floormates were figuring out ethernet or the SLIP/PPP connections, I had a solid connection from the first day, a good counter to the guys ribbing me ab
        • Back at UCSC in '84, they ran a couple of 780s and a couple of 750s under 4.2BSD (the *original* 4.2, from UC Berkeley, not any of these "modern" versions).

          One of the 780s got up to a load average of 75, and one of the 750s had a load average of 45. The interactive response time was slower than molasses (and this was with a 1200bps serial connection), but ... THEY DID NOT CRASH. They continued running without interruption.
      • I'm not going to downplay the stability of the old mainframes, but what did you actually do with them?

        Console apps, simple OS design, hardware from the same vendor..

        If you set up a single new big Sun box with X terminals, you'd get similar availability and a lot more functionality then the old PDP 11.

        But when you try to use hardware that's mass-produced and multi-vendor, based on some good and some loose standards, with software from all over the place and an operating system from Microsoft, you'd bound
    • Imagine a non-Beowulf cluster of MicroVAXes, out of the box seamlessly providing clustered batch processing for rooms full of kerosene-fueled electrostatic plotters . . . . dagnabbit, you kids get the hell off my lawn!

      • MicroVAX? Newbie. I was imagining a DECluster of 785s and a refrigerator-size disk subsystem, used for development work in the 1980s and 1990s (and, for all I know, today). Four packs, 220 megabytes each. Fun, fun, fun... :)
        • Was the 785 the dual-processor 780? My first sysadmin experience was on a cluster of 750s, 'cause my school was cheap. Still, the clustering stuff just worked, and this was in 1986 or 87. The VAXen were sturdy boxes.

          We even had a testing MicroVAX/1 at the FDA that survived a momentary power outage that downed the cluster (your tax dollars were too meager to afford UPSes in those days!). The standing joke was that the uVAX was so damn slow it didn't notice that the power went out.

          I also remember being cal

    • ...But we will stick with our DECnet-based VAX and Alpha clusters because they are known to work, and they work pretty damn well! But that's because it is amongst the finest of DEC engineering. That's the sort of engineering you just don't find these days.
      Thank you.
      John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net), a former DEC software engineer who worked on DECnet

    • Re:Of course it isn't dead! (Score:5, Funny)

      by jayhawk88 ( 160512 ) <jayhawk88@gmail.com> on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @03:18PM (#12997280)
      Allow me to translate this for the rest of you (*Disclaimer: I'M JOKING!*):

      DECnet is often used these days for very mission critical applications. The firm I work for uses DECnet because it is the easiest and most reliable way for us to maintain our VAX and Alpha clusters.
      Our network guys are so old they played spades with Moses. We haven't upgraded a server in 15 years, and that's the way we like it!

      Indeed, it is by far the most superior form of networking out there for applications where the uptime must be literally 100%.
      I can get double time and a half anytime I want since I convinced the CEO that our SQL server needed to be up 24/7.

      We have had sales reps from various vendors come and suggest moving to a Windows 2003/PC setup (HAHA!) or towards a more UNIX/Linux-based setup.
      The entire city's sales force is drooling over the possibility of snagging our contract once our old kit finally goes into meltdown.

      But we will stick with our DECnet-based VAX and Alpha clusters because they are known to work, and they work pretty damn well!
      But I'm one of those power-tripping BOFH's who won't let a Blackberry into the building without my say-so.

      But that's because it is amongst the finest of DEC engineering. That's the sort of engineering you just don't find these days.
      My dad played gold with Ken Olsen.
    • And where do you work?

      1978?

      /rimshot
    • Indeed, it is by far the most superior form of networking out there for applications where the uptime must be literally 100%.

      What properties make it better suited than TCP/IP for critical stability? I admit that I don't know much about many of the "old" protocols, so I probably lack the perspective to really appreciate one over another (kind of like functional programming seems goofy until you try it - then enlightenment!).

      Put another way, why is VAC/Alpha-over-DECnet better than VAC/Alpha-over-TCP/IP

    • The projects I've worked for the last 8 years or so have used VAX and Alpha VMS and I can say that the much-vaunted uptime for VMS tends to be exaggerated. Yes VMS is generally solid, that I won't argue. However, it is very vulnerable to HW failure, just like anything else, and maybe more so than anything else we have around. We have had many many instances of a rogue VAXStation or microVAX taking out an entire cluster, redundancy and all. I see that as unacceptable.

      You might say it must have been a ad

  • Double Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by richieb ( 3277 ) <richieb@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:16PM (#12996655) Homepage Journal
    I remember installing DECnet on a couple of PDP-11/70s. Back in the Jurassic era of computing. And then writing some networking code in Pascal....

    • Then that puts me back in the Devonian era (1985), when I did the same thing in Vax Fortran and assembler!

    • Back in the Jurassic era of computing.
      I remember it vividly (I'm 45).

      Like, when the operating system was like actually

      • stable
      • documented
      • consistent, so that you could actually memorize commands and their options
      Those were the days.

      I apologize for being an old fart, but having spent the last five years with Windows as my primary OS (after having been on VMS since 1985), I'm still emphatically unimpressed with what goes for "modern technology".

      Of course there are things you can do on Windows or Unix that simply weren't available on VMS. But when it comes to reliability and sheer good design, I still very much miss VMS.

      Like I said, I apologize. :-)

    • I'm just pissed off that RT-11 doesn't support DECNet. I'll need to put RSX11 or RSTS/E on my PDP-11/73 [kicks-ass.net] if I want to use it.


      Bah.

  • I'm 35 and I never heard of this. Go figure.

  • But OSI killed Decnet (Score:5, Informative)

    by shoppa ( 464619 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:22PM (#12996714)
    The coming of OSI and it's asinine 7-layer model stiltified DECnet in the 90's. I'm sure that being OSI-compliant was a big deal at the time, but nobody cares anymore. And other than crossing the t's and dotting the i's to meet some government spec at the time, nobody really wanted it.

    Before OSI, DECnet was sleek, widespread, easy, and portable across many platforms.

    After OSI compliance, it was sluggish, cantankerous, difficult, and verbose.
    • sad news for you, OSI is just a model, a reference framework that no real world networking model follows. TCP/IP is a four layer model

      • sad news for you, OSI is just a model, a reference framework that no real world networking model follows

        What, not even DECNET/OSI? I beg to differ - see this Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] - the OSI model got coded. The size of the manual set alone was enough to scare most programmers away, let alone their actual contents.

      • Sadder news for you (Score:3, Informative)

        by Medievalist ( 16032 )
        In an attempt to satisfy the federal government, DEC actually implemented the OSI reference model. The whole bloody thing, as documented by the model itself, which is how the world found out it is a bad idea.

        I've installed it. I've used it. I remember the whole GOSIP debacle. I remember ripping it out by the roots and reinstalling DECnet Phase IV - which was excellent, although a bit bursty on low bandwidth links.

  • Hmm worms and virii (Score:3, Insightful)

    by christoofar ( 451967 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:23PM (#12996719)
    I guess if you wanted to keep really sensitive stuff from being seen, you could PIX your application server and behind that, everything runs on DECnet behind the application server.

    But, if you're going to do that anyway... you could just as well use Appletalk, VINES or NetBIOS (w/o TCPIP) instead of DECnet... neither of which would be visible to outsiders.

    None of this will save you from VBS attacking desktops. Email is email, whether it came in over IP, a floppy disk, or DECnet.

  • First try "show known nodes"... (Score:3, Informative)

    by kriegsman ( 55737 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:24PM (#12996730) Homepage
    Stumbled onto a VMS/DECNet machine and want to explore a little? First try "show known nodes", and then... our friends at Phrack have a HOWTO guide [phrack.org], including a copy of the all-important "TELL.COM".

    -Mark: (remembers VMS) && (age > 25)

    • Stumbled onto a VMS/DECNet machine and want to explore a little? First try "show known nodes", and then... our friends at Phrack have a HOWTO guide, including a copy of the all-important "TELL.COM".

      And if you're having a little trouble stumbling into a DECnet machine, the http://www.openvms-rocks.com [openvms-rocks.com] domain mentioned in the submission is hosted on the Deathrow Cluster [vistech.net] where you can get free access and an @openvms-rocks.com email address.

  • When I was your age... (Score:4, Funny)

    by cshark ( 673578 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:33PM (#12996822)
    Why, I use DECnet all the time. I am a purist, and refuse to work with upstart protocols like TCP/IP. I believe the height of technology in its purist form came in 1985. So why upgrade?

    Why, my gopher web server works just fine, and I run it from a floppy disk on my 8088 XT. In fact, I do everything on my 8088 XT. It can even play Midi files in mono! Sure, it's not as pretty as some of the fancy shmacy new wave "windows" systems, but show me something you can't do from the command line in DOS, and I'll show you something I refuse to learn how to do.

    Why, when I was your age, we had to walk ten miles to school, program in BASIC, and the games we played were based on revolutionary 8 bit technology! We didn't have an "internet." Internet schminternet, give me a text based BBS for my Hayes 3 Baud modem, and I can download over pixilated porn till the cows come home. And we liked it!
    • Why, when I was your age, we had to walk ten miles to school, program in BASIC...

      That's nothing. We had to walk a hundred miles to school and program in BASIC both ways. Our games were based on revolutionary unary technology. And we liked it!

      Oh, and we slept in a wet paper bag in the middle of the freeway, and every night our dad would come home and beat us to sleep. Yada yada yada...

    • Re:When I was your age... (Score:5, Funny)

      by oaklybonn ( 600250 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @03:05PM (#12997123)
      Jerry? Jerry Pournelle? How the hell are you man!
    • Why, when I was a young programmer we had to write the code in the snow with our pee, and a compiler was just a word for the pilot of the hovering dirigible that read the instructions and passed them to the ALU, which was another fellow with an abacus. They would wrap the results around a rock, and drop it on my house when the program would exit. We had to walk uphill...

  • Sign me up! I'm making the switch! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by borkus ( 179118 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:36PM (#12996845) Homepage
    To an operating system with TCP/IP, DECNET, IPX and SNA support -

    OS/2 [mit.edu]

    In the early 90's, if you wanted, you could get OS/2 to load a whole pile of transport protocols - which was pretty much necessary for the alphabet soup that ran client-server [byte.com] apps back then. In fact, Doom ran on IPX/SPX [faqs.org] before it ran in TCP/IP.

  • Ahhh, VMS and DrECknet (Score:5, Informative)

    by YankeeInExile ( 577704 ) * on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:44PM (#12996921) Homepage Journal
    I remember having a heterogynous network with VMS w/ the CMU-TEK TCP/IP package and Sun 4 with DECNET. You could telnet to the Vax, or at the vax say
    SET HOST SPARKY
    .

    Those who wished to mock VMS would say "VMS Only has two commands, SET and LOGOUT"

    Sadly, SET was terribly overloaded ... SET DEFAULT was how you changed (among other things) your current working directory; logging into another host across the network was SET HOST; disabling traps in a .com file was SET NOON;

    I loved VMS, not because it was a speedy lightweight OS (it was absolutely the opposite in every way) ; but it was the friendliest OS out there for the hard-core assembly language programmer, and the VAX has an architecture that makes programming in assembly a joy.

  • Ah yes, the one with the MAC address thing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by po8 ( 187055 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:45PM (#12996932)

    Yeah, I remember DECnet. The coolest thing about it is that it required you to have a special DECnet MAC address [cisco.com] for every Ethernet port on each host. The good news is that this led to widespread Ethernet MAC reprogrammability...

    • Yeah, I remember DECnet. The coolest thing about it is that it required you to have a special DECnet MAC address for every Ethernet port on each host. The good news is that this led to widespread Ethernet MAC reprogrammability...

      Many moons ago I worked for DEC, and spent lots of time making VAXen play and talk to each other. The deal with the DECnet MAC address was DECnet's solution to the problem solved by ARP [ietf.org] in the TCP/IP world.

      The big problem was hooking PCs to DECnet in the days of 640k. The o

  • Linux Decnet (Score:3, Informative)

    by OlRickDawson ( 648236 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:48PM (#12996960)
    As a user of the linux decnet stack, I would say the Linux decnet stack works pretty well for talking to old VAXen. There are still places with old VAX computer embedded in equipment that would take millions to replace. The Navy is using Charon VAX http://www.softresint.com/charon-vax/ [softresint.com] in some places to keep from having to replace the attached hardware. SIMH http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ [trailing-edge.com] works very well for emulating a vax, but is software only. A vax emulation running on SIMH on linux can talk decnet, and so can the linux machine it runs on. However, because DECNET sets the mac address as the decnet address, the Linux's decnet can't talk to the SIMH running on it. So, I had to put tcp/ip on the simulator to get them to talk. It would be nice if Linux's emulator could set it's mac address at runtime, and have several, so it could to the routing, and talk to the SIMH emulator, but it isn't possible now.

  • Oh, great... (Score:4, Funny)

    by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:52PM (#12996998) Homepage
    Alpha is dead, but DECnet lives on.

    *sigh*

  • Choice.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wfberg ( 24378 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:53PM (#12997006)
    Quoth TFA: Further, there are certain capabilities present in DECnet that have never evolved in TCP/IP. These include transparent remote file access, session management and validation, and integrated system management access.


    Yes, TCP/IP has not evolved these layers at all. In stead, TCP/IP users are forced to accept that TCP/IP only provides reliable socket-based bi-directional streams of data routed world wide. Meanwhile in stead of being comfortably locked into a proprietary system, they face the challenge of choosing which applications to use to manage their sessions, presentation and file transfer.


    HTTP(S), WebDAV, (S)FTP, SSH, SOAP, JMS, BXXP, XMPP, RTSP, SIP, NFS, SMB, NNTP, IMAP, etc. etc. And all of these protocols come with their own strengths and weaknesses! Worse, you could even swap TCP/IP out from underneath some of these protocols in favor of, for example, IPv6 or in some cases even an old dinosaur like NetBIOS.


    To make matters worse, all these protocols come with easy-to use APIs, libraries, executable tools and even multi-vendor support, so far as to even be integrated into development environments such as "Java" or "Perl"..


    The obvious drawback of this is of course that relying on these, for the most part, "open standards" makes it easier for your software to interoperate and be compatible across platforms and networks.


    Next article written by Captain Obvious; "Many enterprises using Windows file sharing to replicate mission-critical information across Windows systems."


    (Not that there's anything wrong with being lazy and using the OS' default transparant network thingamajig.. But that's not exactly winning on merits)


    Now, if any one has any information as why DECnet is (supposedly) so much more robust and dependable than TCP/IP (especially DECnet-over-IP), I'd like to hear it. Does it use error correcting codes? Does it have some sort of secDNS equivalent (or even an analog to secure BGP? that would be kinda neat).

  • DecNet sounds wonderful and all; without doing a lot of hunting, can someone summarize the technical aspects of the protocol/implementation that makes it so?
    • Excellent question! Piddling little things like performance
      and does-my-router-know-it aside, the DECNet wasn't
      just a protocol, it was an enhanced user experience.

      Instead of just transferring files, you could refer to a
      file on a foreign computer by name (a facility similar
      to our DNS (domain name system)). The network access
      was transparent.

      So, every file open of "file" opened the file in your
      current default directory.
      Open "directory/file" and you can get the file in a subdirectory
      Open "disk:directory/file
  • DECNET? Bah, too much work! :)

    I ran NetBEUI on a small company network for years. Want to know why? It wasn't routable.

    The logic was you can't get compromised from the Internet if you cant route off network. Of course that's not true, but it really does make it harder for anyone to break in. Of course, that was before they discovered VPN's and Terminal Services, so NetBEUI went away and the network went all TCP/IP.

    NetBEUI...good times...good times... ...hey wait a sec, NetBEUI sucks!! UGH! Darn broadcast

  • What are the odds? (Score:5, Funny)

    by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @03:33PM (#12997430) Journal
    The odds of folks under the age of 25 on Slashdot having heard of DECnet are pretty slim
    Not as slim as the odds of folks under the age of 25 that _aren't_ on Slashdot having heard of DECnet.
  • Back in the late 90's I did some work on the VMS TCPip stack. It was handy being able to uninstall the IP stack remotely over a DECnet connection.
  • According to the wikipedia link:

    "It evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures"

    This thing could be used for sharing music! The RIAA will be after them!

  • Telenet (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ImaFraud ( 872721 )
    Let's not forget about the old X.25 Telenet network which is still publicly accessible. A few years back myself and a friend of mine wrote an NUA scanner to poke around Telenet and see what's out there. We were awfully surprised to see that there were many systems still openly accessible. Not only that but we also found that there were a plethora of freely available PADs in most major cities. At one point we had compiled a list of several hundred of these numbers and methodically began mapping out large por
  • All this talk about DECNet and no mention of twinax?

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