Development of a TCP/IP for the IBM/370

  • Authors:

  • Robert K. Brandriff;Clifford A. Lynch;Mark H. Needleman

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Office of the President and Universitywide Services, Division of Library Automation, 186 University Hall, Berkeley, CA;University of California, Office of the President and Universitywide Services, Division of Library Automation, 186 University Hall, Berkeley, CA;University of California, Office of the President and Universitywide Services, Division of Library Automation, 186 University Hall, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • SIGCOMM '85 Proceedings of the ninth symposium on Data communications
  • Year:
  • 1985

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Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation decisions that have been made in developing software to support the DARPA TCP/IP protocols for the IBM OS/370 environment at the University of California Division of Library Automation. The implementation is designed to support over 100 concurrent TCP connections, all of which are managed by a single program, which acts as a specialized sub-operating system. The system is optimized for line-by-line or screen-by-screen terminal traffic rather than character-by-character traffic. In addition, this TCP is designed to exploit the availability of the large main storage and processor speed available on the IBM/370.TCP/IP is generally considered to be a mature protocol specification; however, in the course of our implementation we found several parts to be either ambiguous or problematic — in particular, error handling and notification, ICMP and its relationship to other protocols, and synchronization of data flow with TCP callers.We also discuss problems encountered in trying to replace hardwired terminals in a public access environment with TCP and TELNET, and some protocol changes that would make these protocols more hospitable to our environment.