Project UTEXAS ARPANET

Here's a fantastic intro to the ARPANET Reconstruction Project. The following discussion is thanks to Clive Dawson and lightly restructured to help lead up to the draft project sketch

The IMP arrived on the UT campus in 1977 and was installed alongside the DEC-10 in the HRC. This was because originally there were hopes that the DEC-10 would become the first ARPANET host on the Texas node. But DEC never offered support for the ARPANET on the DEC-10’s standard OS, TOPS-10. So the DEC-10 in HRC was never connected to the ARPANET. [1]

Meanwhile, there was a PDP-11 running UNIX in the Daily Texan composing room at TSP (Texas Student Publications). A hacked version of UNIX from the U. of Illinois was installed, and the IMP was moved across campus to the Communications Building. Thus, a PDP-11/45 running UNIX became UTEXAS, the first ARPANET host on campus. The select few who knew about this would connect to the 11 via dialup modems and from there could venture out to the rest of the ARPANET.

Sometime around 1978-80, a newer IMP was delivered by BBN and installed in the Computation Center. A PDP-11/70 was installed there to connect to the new IMP, and so the UTEXAS host was rehomed from TSP to the Comp. Center. 

It was only when the first DEC-20 arrived and was installed in Painter Hall that the PDP-11 became UTEXAS-11 and the 20 was named UTEXAS-20. As I recall, the 11 retained the host nickname of UTEXAS.

Draft project sketch

Love Oscar's physical hardware and would be fun if we could use those at home when we like. Core project though could be entirely docker containers? Hosted in the cloud where we can all work on it together globally and easily get good uptime? Something like?

• Container1a TSP IMP and/or maybe container1b CC IMP
• Container2a Painter Research DEC-20 and/or maybe container2b TSP PDP-11/45 and/or container2c CC PDP-11/70
• Container3 HRC DEC-10

And then... even if it's a tad bit unhistorical.?. Telnet over ARPANET into the HRC DEC-10 and Decwar...

Notes

[1] The only DEC-10 OS's that supported a connection were TENEX (developed at BBN), ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System at MIT), and several heavily customized versions of TOPS-10 at places like CMU, Harvard, and Wharton. The Stanford AI Lab ran WAITS (the West-coast Alternative to ITS) on their DEC-10s.