RFC 967 (rfc967) - Page 2 of 2

All victims together

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RFC 967                                                    December 1985
All Victims Together


   What I'd like to see emerge is a bunch of little essays along the
   lines of what I attempted to do on Multics in RFC 928, pp.14-21,
   which would probably be a waste of electrons to reproduce here, but I
   will if Jon thinks it's worthwhile at some level. With luck,
   volunteers will emerge to discuss all of the major operating systems
   currently on the net and most of the minor ones as well, since one of
   the most interesting philosophical aspects of the exercise is to see
   just what cuts and pastes get made to any OS if it's networked. My
   guess is that given more modern systems' tendencies to make adding
   device drivers more straightforward and to offer interprocess
   communication primitives at the system level, the likeliest
   difficulties to encounter would be getting on the process creation
   path appropriately for Telnet--but that's reasoning ahead of the
   data. Suffice it to say that each piece should address Host-Host
   protocol interpreter(s) integration as well as Host-Comm Subnet
   Processor PI (including device driver, if one), plus something about
   Telnet and something else about FTP (at least to the extent of
   whether it's per-user or "monolithic"--on the server side, that is),
   and, of course, some relevant anatomizing of the OS itself.

   The moral, it seems to me, is that we have a chance to strike back at
   the oppressors by showing them what they should be furnishing with
   their silly off-the-rack systems if they are going to continue to
   object to our alterations to make the bloody things fit anywhere near
   right. It's a little extra effort on our part, but it's probably a
   worthy goal. Indeed, if anybody from IPTO is watching I suppose I'd
   even go so far as to suggest a pro tem System Integration Task force
   if I hadn't already volunteered once in this thing and used up my
   quota.

   Think about it.

EDITOR'S NOTE

   The editor recalls a session at the 5th Data Communication Symposium
   (the one at Snowbird) titled "Impact of Networks on Host-System
   Design and Architecture". (1977)












Padlipsky
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