Let's give PRO/VENIX a barely adequate, pre-C89 TCP/IP stack, featuring Slirp-CK

a year ago

The article discusses the challenges and solutions for networking a DEC Professional 380 running PRO/VENIX V2.0, a system not originally designed for networking.
It details the historical context of the DEC Professional series, highlighting their incompatibility within the PDP-11 family and DEC's initial strategy to market them as office computers.
The article explains the porting of Unix to the DEC Professional, specifically PRO/VENIX, based on VenturCom's Venix, and the technical hurdles encountered during this process.
It describes the development of a minimal TCP/IP stack (BASS) for the DEC Professional, optimized for client tasks over a slow serial link, including ICMP, DNS, NTP, and simple TCP protocols.
The article covers the limitations of the PRO/VENIX C compiler, including identifier length restrictions and the absence of unsigned char, and how these were worked around.
It provides a step-by-step guide on setting up the network connection using SLIP and Slirp-CK, including hardware requirements and software configuration.
The article concludes with the successful implementation of the network stack on the DEC Professional 380, despite its limitations, and invites readers to try it on other systems.

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