Subject: Re: FTP: LIST vs. NLST
To: None <netbsd-users@netbsd.org>
From: Steven M. Bellovin <smb@research.att.com>
List: netbsd-users
Date: 01/31/2001 21:54:06
kre is quite correct. To fill in a few minor points... 3Com had a
(mostly user-level) TCP/IP for Unix, called UNET; it was certainly
available in 1982 but not, I think, much earlier. BBN did a kernel
implementation that was apparently ancestral to the 4.2bsd Berkeley
version. I seem to recall a TCP (or was it NCP) for PDP 11-based
Unixes around then, too.
As for MVS -- there was no notion of a "directory". File names had
levels, but these were separated by periods. Creating a new level
in the "system catalog" (as opposed to a reference that also required
you to specify the disk drive type and "volume serial") required a
moderately arcane operation, much less common than mkdir. The notion
of treating a level as a file would have been quite foreign; the
catalog was not part of the disk in anything like the way it is on Unix.
I don't know when Multics came online; I know that I used it via the
ARPAnet in the (northern hemisphere) summer of 1976.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb