🚀 go-pugleaf

First off,  I'd like to publicly thank those who took the time to 
respond to my request for information on the Chaosnet protocol suite.  
They are:

	John Wroclawski 	<jtw@lcs.mit.edu>
	Barry Margolin 		<barmar@Think.COM>
	Alan Bawden 		<Alan@lcs.mit.edu>
	Patrick Sobalvarro 	<pgs@ai.mit.edu>
and
	the people behind the scenes at MIT (names?) who steered my 
        request to someone who "had the answers". 

Thanks, all!

Now, on to the good stuff...

1) Documentation -- apparently, no online documents exist, but I was 
                    pointed at two sources of printed matter.

   The definitive document is:

	MIT AI Lab memo #628,"Chaosnet", by David A. Moon, June 1981

   I've sent a request for more info to <publications@ai.mit.edu>, but have 
   not recieved anything yet (but, it's only been a couple of days).

   The Chaosnet protocol documentation is also part of the networking 
   documentation for the Symbolics Lisp Machines.  I spoke with someone at 
   Symbolics, and documentation is still available.  I did not bother to ask 
   about price, etc. since I expect to have a LispM, complete with manuals, RSN. 
   									[ :-) ]

2) Code --  this wasn't really the main object of my quest, but if it were 
            out there, it couldn't hurt to see how it was done.

   Code to implement Chaosnet exists [or, at least, existed] for a plethora 
   of systems, Unix included.  I didn't persue it to the point of pinpointing
   an actual source,  since I wanted to try and "roll my own" first. 

   One respondant indicated that code for Sun systems (probably Sun3) was,
   at one point, available from Symbolics.  The person I spoke to there 
   was unfamiliar with this particular item. and so couldn't provide a
   definitive answer or additional details.

3) Tidbit --  just an amusing little factoid that turned up along the way

   As one might expect when digging up something from the past like this,
   Chaosnet sees very little use nowadays.  A person as Symbolics did say that
   it is still used inside the Lisp Machines to handle some internal stuff. 
   [Much in the way, I suppose, that DomainOS still uses Apollo DDN protocols 
   to do some things, even though most of the services now speak TCP?]


That's about it...

Again, thanks to all who had a hand in pointing me along the way.

Steve
---
Steven Rezsutek					steve@endgame.gsfc.nasa.gov
Nyma / NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 
Greenbelt MD 					301 286 7014