Reproduced with permission.

[Parts of this conversation relate to the standards followed for packet tracing format]

TheNet has nothing to do with BPQ. Ok, we got a copy of the NET/ROM manual from the Leicester group in early 1988, we met them at the Trowell motorway service station. This gave us the protocol definition.

John started working on his code immediately, and using an IBM SDLC card and a telephone modem, he transmitted his first AX.25 packet shortly afterwards. He phoned me to get me to listen for it.

The KISS protocol was already published by then, but you needed to burn ROMs to use it, it wasn’t included in the standard TAPR ROMs at that stage. Kantronics added it first as standard I think.

His software was written 8088 assembler as a TSR, DesqView was used by certain BBS programs to allow for multiple simultaneous connections. MBL431 rings a bell. BPQCode in the very early days was in source form so you could configure and compile it. That stopped fairly quickly after some people changed the copyrights on it, which annoyed John immensely.

I wrote the packet tracing code in either late 88 or 89, to improve it. DesqView was a sort of early VM software, it did a remarkable job for the time. It’s been like that for over 35 years and follows the TAPR format for the AX.25 part. The NET/ROM part is my creation.

John created multi-drop KISS and Ack mode to get around issues in the KISS protocol. He did a version for the Kantronics Data Engine with multi-drop KISS, and we ran a multi-port node with it: 4m, 2m, 70cms, and two dedicated 23cms links.

He did an OS/2 version at one stage, and maybe started porting it to C around that time. It was closed source for many years. I may have some very early versions on 5.25” floppy disks somewhere.

The node was GB3RP/GB7RP in IO93FB as part of the DANPAC network. It closed down sometime in the mid-90s I think.

TheNet came later and was subject to a court case as it was deemed to be a reverse engineered NET/ROM, with the C arguments reversed. However the cat was out of the bag so to speak. Host Mode is an abomination and should be shunned by all sane people!

I wrote the Linux kernel AX.25 code starting in 1995 as a completely separate development. I added NET/ROM and ROSE (X.25 later 3) which was always a minority protocol, although one well tailored for packet as it has a very low overhead.

Tadd KA2DEW:

There were several wierd parts of the NETROM vs TheNET case. One was that TheNET source code was distributed and NET/ROM was not. The NORDLINK people were accused of decompiling the executables into C source, then changing the names of functions and distributing the source code. But how did NORDLINK get the C source? Decompiling the executable does not get named functions. That was wierd. Another is that the Germans posted versions of the program that were both cruider than NET/ROM and were better featured later, as if this were an ongoing project. NET/ROM launched fully baked, as far as I could tell, and only had one or two later versions. This still doesn't make sense to me.

Jonathan G4KLX:

I stopped AX.25 development in 1998 I think. I can’t answer those points, but NET/ROM was a commercial product with your node callsign burnt into it. I bought a few and they cost about £40 each in 1988.

I never used TheNet as we had BPQCode which was superior. Ultimate TheNet like NET/ROM had to live in a 32K ROM with 32K RAM, and a slow Z80, not ideal.

John got invited over to the US a lot with it expenses paid at the time.

Tadd KA2DEW:

I spent quite a few months writing a book on how to build and manage packet nodes from 1991 to 1994. NEDA went to print with it in 1994. It's on archive.org if you look for North East Digital Association Annual 1994

https://archive.org/details/NEDA_1994_Annual_v5_1994-04/mode/2up

Jonathan G4KLX:

GB3RP suffered from temperature extremes, but it survived. If we’d had Pi’s at the time, it would have been perfect. A Pi and a pile of Nino TNCs and we’d have been laughing.

Another memory: early 1988, stain meeting in Bradford, maybe sysop 2 or sysop 3, I think the first John went to. I travelled with him. I was at Sysop 1 in Crick in late 87 when it was all very new for everyone, pre-BPQCode and the UK network was transitioning from unreliable digipeating to unreliable networking!

At that sysops meeting, G3RUH gave a demonstration of his 9600 bps modems, and we were mightily impressed, although no RF was involved.

Both John and I got RUH beta boards (only difference was a missing pull-up or pull-down resistor on the DCD line), although at the time we didn’t have 9600 bps enabled radios. So we never rolled it out ☹️

My modem spent its time on the packet satellites a few years later attached to a Data Engine. There ends my history lesson for now.