The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.
[previous article] [next article]When the Engineering Computer Network was originally organized back in the latter part of the 1970's, networking technology was still in its infancy and needed networking software was not available. In order to interconnect the machines making up the ECN, a protocol suite which we have come to know as "PNet" was developed by the ECN staff. The principle user commands using this protocol were "con", "ns", and networking resource sharing commands such as "f77." and "troff.".
Over the past few years, networking technology has come of age and most educational UNIX sites have migrated to the Internet protocol family, also known as TCP/IP. User commands in the Internet family are "ftp", "rcp", "rlogin", "rsh", and "telnet". These protocols are now in widespread use across the country and are the only networking protocols used at all other Purdue UNIX sites.
With the removal of our last production PDP-11 system, we feel that this is a good time to move away from the "PNet" system and to the generally accepted TCP/IP based programs. The network resource sharing facilities of the ECN have been upgraded to run under TCP/IP. The "ns" command has been converted to run under TCP/IP, but in order to better utilize future software development, we strongly encourage all users to switch to the standard Internet tools such as "rcp" and "rsh". The "con" command will not be supported under TCP/IP because its standard replacement under TCP/IP, "rlogin", is considered a significant improvement. All users are asked to use "rlogin" in place of "con".
HTML