TCPware is a third party layered product published by "Process Software LLC" of Framingham, Massachusetts to add TCP/IP capabilities to Digital Equipment Corporation's VMS operating system. In the early 1990s Digital Equipment Corporation had an internal policy favoring their own product, DECnet. Meanwhile, many VMS users in governments, large corporations and universities were discovering the "TCP/IP based" internet and required third party software to enable connectivity to it.
TCPware was enhanced in subsequent releases. Version 2.2, in 1991, added support for Sybase database procucts using the standard VMS functions. It introduced remote procedure calls (RPCs) to support distributed computing. It also added tn3270 for IBM 3270 terminal emulation, and support for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). [1] The current version is 6.1. [2]
Two features of the TCPware APIs, the "Telnet Library" and the "FTP Library", allow a relatively inexperienced programmer to use a high level language to write software which will connect across the internet. Quite a bit of legacy software now relies on these modules. TCPware's "Telnet Library" can be used for other protocol transfers like HTTP and SMTP.
In the early 1990s, DEC produced its own version of UNIX called ULTRIX which supported TCP/IP. Almost as a "skunk works" project, it produced a layered product for VMS called UCX (Ultrix Communications Extensions) which later evolved into "TCPIP Services for OpenVMS".
The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the Internet Protocol (IP). Early versions of this networking model were known as the Department of Defense (DoD) model because the research and development were funded by the United States Department of Defense through DARPA.
Telnet is a client/server application protocol that provides access to virtual terminals of remote systems on local area networks or the Internet. It is a protocol for bidirectional 8-bit communications. Its main goal was to connect terminal devices and terminal-oriented processes.
OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using OpenVMS include banks and financial services, hospitals and healthcare, telecommunications operators, network information services, and industrial manufacturers. During the 1990s and 2000s, there were approximately half a million VMS systems in operation worldwide.
Xerox Network Systems (XNS) is a computer networking protocol suite developed by Xerox within the Xerox Network Systems Architecture. It provided general purpose network communications, internetwork routing and packet delivery, and higher level functions such as a reliable stream, and remote procedure calls. XNS predated and influenced the development of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking model, and was very influential in local area networking designs during the 1980s.
Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems (Sun) in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a computer network much like local storage is accessed. NFS, like many other protocols, builds on the Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Call system. NFS is an open IETF standard defined in a Request for Comments (RFC), allowing anyone to implement the protocol.
DECnet is a suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation. Originally released in 1975 in order to connect two PDP-11 minicomputers, it evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures, thus transforming DEC into a networking powerhouse in the 1980s. Initially built with three layers, it later (1982) evolved into a seven-layer OSI-compliant networking protocol.
Systems Network Architecture (SNA) is IBM's proprietary networking architecture, created in 1974. It is a complete protocol stack for interconnecting computers and their resources. SNA describes formats and protocols but, in itself, is not a piece of software. The implementation of SNA takes the form of various communications packages, most notably Virtual Telecommunications Access Method (VTAM), the mainframe software package for SNA communications.
Ultrix is the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) discontinued native Unix operating systems for the PDP-11, VAX, MicroVAX and DECstations.
In computing, the Windows Sockets API (WSA), later shortened to Winsock, is an application programming interface (API) that defines how Windows network application software should access network services, especially TCP/IP. It defines a standard interface between a Windows TCP/IP client application and the underlying TCP/IP protocol stack. The nomenclature is based on the Berkeley sockets API used in BSD for communications between programs.
Synchronet is a multiplatform BBS software package, with current ports for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and BSD variants. Past versions also ran on MS-DOS and OS/2, but support for those platforms were dropped in version 3.0.
A terminal server connects devices with a serial port to a local area network (LAN). Products marketed as terminal servers can be very simple devices that do not offer any security functionality, such as data encryption and user authentication. The primary application scenario is to enable serial devices to access network server applications, or vice versa, where security of the data on the LAN is not generally an issue. There are also many terminal servers on the market that have highly advanced security functionality to ensure that only qualified personnel can access various servers and that any data that is transmitted across the LAN, or over the Internet, is encrypted. Usually, companies that need a terminal server with these advanced functions want to remotely control, monitor, diagnose and troubleshoot equipment over a telecommunications network.
Local Area Transport (LAT) is a non-routable networking technology developed by Digital Equipment Corporation to provide connection between the DECserver terminal servers and Digital's VAX and Alpha and MIPS host computers via Ethernet, giving communication between those hosts and serial devices such as video terminals and printers. The protocol itself was designed in such a manner as to maximize packet efficiency over Ethernet by bundling multiple characters from multiple ports into a single packet for Ethernet transport.
Mail-11 was the native email transport protocol used by Digital Equipment Corporation's VMS operating system, and supported by several other DEC operating systems such as Ultrix.
VAXELN is a discontinued real-time operating system for the VAX family of computers produced by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts.
In computer networking, DECserver initially referred to a highly successful family of asynchronous console server / terminal server / print server products introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and later referred to a class of UNIX-variant application and file server products based upon the MIPS processor. In February 1998, DEC sold its Network Products Business to Cabletron, which then spun out as its own company, Digital Networks, in September 2000.
A network socket is a software structure within a network node of a computer network that serves as an endpoint for sending and receiving data across the network. The structure and properties of a socket are defined by an application programming interface (API) for the networking architecture. Sockets are created only during the lifetime of a process of an application running in the node.
PATHWORKS was the trade name used by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts for a series of programs that eased the interoperation of Digital's minicomputers and servers with personal computers. It was available for both PC and Mac systems, with support for MS-DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows on the PC. Before it was named PATHWORKS, it was known as PCSA.
NCSA Telnet is an implementation of the Telnet protocol developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, first released in 1986 and continuously developed until 1995. The initial implementation ran under Mac OS and Microsoft MS-DOS, and provided basic DEC VT102 terminal emulation with support for multiple simultaneous connections and an internal FTP server. NCSA Telnet was the first implementation of telnet for the Macintosh or PC that provided the ability to connect to multiple hosts simultaneously.
Douglas Earl Comer is a professor of computer science at Purdue University, where he teaches courses on operating systems and computer networks. He has written numerous research papers and textbooks, and currently heads several networking research projects. He has been involved in TCP/IP and internetworking since the late 1970s, and is an internationally recognized authority. He designed and implemented X25NET and Cypress networks, and the Xinu operating system. He is director of the Internetworking Research Group at Purdue, editor of Software - Practice and Experience, and a former member of the Internet Architecture Board. Comer completed the original version of Xinu in 1979. Since then, Xinu has been expanded and ported to a wide variety of platforms, including: IBM PC, Macintosh, Digital Equipment Corporation VAX and DECstation 3100, Sun Microsystems Sun-2, Sun-3 and SPARCstations, and Intel Pentium. It has been used as the basis for many research projects. Furthermore, Xinu has been used as an embedded system in products by companies such as Motorola, Mitsubishi, Hewlett-Packard, and Lexmark.
InterCon Systems Corporation was founded in April 1988 by Kurt D. Baumann and Mikki Barry to produce software to connect Macintosh computers in environments that were not Macintosh-exclusive. At the time, there was no real concept of the Internet and there was still a question of whether the TCP/IP protocols or OSI protocols would be adopted widely. Over the next 9 years, the company grew from three employees to over 100 and sold software in the US, Europe and Japan.