Network Working Group A. Stokes
Request for Comments: 588 UKICS
NIC: 20217 October 1973
LONDON NODE IS NOW UP
The London node of the ARPANET has been on the Net (Address 42) since
early September. It consists of a TIP (Address 170) and, at present,
a local HOST (0), a PDP-9, which front-ends the Rutherford High
Energy Laboratory 360/195 located 60 miles from London and connect to
it by a 2.4 Kbps line. The specific details of the 360 will soon
appear in the Resource Notebook, but, in brief, it has 2 megabytes of
fast store (750ns), a fixed head disk and a large number of other
peripherals. It operates under OS/MVT release 21.7 and HASP II
version 3.1, with a locally written message switching system MAST and
an interactive editor ELECTRIC. In addition to the local hardware,
it supports about 20 remote workstations, which are, in many cases
GEC 2050s simulating IBM 1130s. Eventually, other Hosts will be
attached to the Very Distant Host Interface (Address 234).
The PDP-9 at the Institute of Computer Science also simulates a 1130
with 2 card readers, 2 card punches, two line printers, three MAST
consoles, and a system console. It has a 16K (18 bit) words store, a
256K word drum and a number of devices usually attached by modem
interfaces. The 1130 simulator software has been interfaced to an
ARPA system, which, at present, has IMP-HOST, HOST-HOST, ICP, and
TELNET protocols. The TELNET link is initially to the PDP-9 from
whence the user may login to the 360 provided one of the two MAST
ports is available (the third being for local use). The access is to
ELECTRIC, and the user may enter and edit files, submit them to the
batch stream, and inspect the output interactively from a terminal.
The facilities will be extended soon to allow the printing of jobs at
TIPS and later the RJE and FTP protocols will be implemented.
The 360 is available for limited experimental use, and a free login
facility has been provided (GUEST). This account has a very limited
allowance (currently, 1min CPU time/week), and is designed only for
demonstration purposes.
All jobs under this account must be Class X, which has a maximum run
time of 10secs. Proper accounts, for which there will be no charge,
can be arranged for appropriate users by contacting KIRSTEIN@ISI. It
is not planned, at present, to make the 360/195 a normal service
HOST, like for example, the CCN machine. However, the machine will
be made available for cooperative projects involving a US group and