[Simh] Resurrecting the ARPAnet IMP

[Bob Armstrong]

   This summer a group of us worked together to resurrect the original
ARPAnet IMP software, and I'm now happy to say that the IMP lives again in
simulation.    It's possible to run the original IMP software on a modified
version of the H316 simh and to set up a virtual network of simulated IMPs
talking to each other.   IMP to IMP connections, which would have originally
been carried over leased telephone lines, are tunneled over IP.  As far as
we can tell, everything works pretty much as it did in the early 1970s.
IMPs are able to exchange routing information, console to console
communications, network statistics, and they would carry host traffic if
there were hosts on the network.  The hooks are in there to allow simh to
support the IMP side of the 1822 host interface, and the next step would be
to recover the OS for an ARPAnet era host and then extend the corresponding
simulator to talk to the IMP simulation.  

 

  If you'd like to know more, you can read a detailed account of the whole
adventure here -

 

http://walden-family.com/bbn/imp-code.pdf

 

  Everyone involved has agreed to release their work under the same terms as
Bob Supnik's original simh license, and I'm looking for suggestions as to
how to handle that.  We could just ZIP everything up and host it on the
website along with all the other BBN and ARPAnet documentation.  If the
community considers the simh extensions for the BBN hardware to be of
general interest then it could be submitted to the current simh repository.
Or it could go somewhere else - I am open to suggestions.

 

Thanks,

Bob Armstrong

 

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