Chaosnet

Chaosnet is the name for both an internetworking protocol family, and an early LAN technology, both invented at the MIT AI Laboratory; the latter was the LAN on which the protocol first ran.

The LAN was a CSMA-CD system modeled on the Xerox PARC 3 megabit/second Experimental Ethernet, running over cable TV coaxial cable (using standard CATV connectors to connect the transceivers; not vampire taps, as on the Experimental Ethernet).

The protocol was later made to run over standard 10 megabit/second Ethernet (using protocol 0x0804 [1]), which largely supplanted the Chaosnet hardware. (On Ethernet, the Address Resolution Protocol is required to provide mappings from 16-bit Chaos addresses to the 48-bit addresses used by Ethernet, see [2].)

The protocol provided a reliable byte stream service, but also had a datagram mode.

History

Chaosnet was developed at MIT around 1973-1975, for LISP machines (personal workstations developed to run LISP). It was a local network protocol (about 1-2 km cable lengths), without central control (thus “chaos”). It was “cheap, efficient and fast”: ca 10 times the speed of ARPAnet, or 30000 characters per second (or “double this in some favorable cases”) [3].

Chaosnet was initially called CAIOSnet.

Encapsulation

In addition to the (experimental) Ethernet implementations described above, several encapsulations have been developed. The standard one is using protocol 16 (decimal) on the Internet Protocol - this was implemented e.g in TOPS-20 and in Cisco routers.

Currently, emulated Chaosnet also uses:

• Unix domain sockets (e.g. for the [CADR] emulator)
• UDP (originally developed for [KLH10])
• TLS over TCP/IP (preferred encapsulation across the Internet)

There is a bridge/router that understands all these, including Ethernet and IP, written by Bjorn Victor. It also has an API (a "Network Control Program") providing Chaosnet for modern computers.

Implementations

• LISP machines
• ITS
• TOPS-20
• FOONEX
• VAX/VMS
• BSD Unix
• MINITS
• NSWIT
• PDP-11 Unix V7
• Unix V8
• MagicSix
• Chaosnet Bridge
• Oswalds's Python and Lisp implementations
• Linux

Hardware, and simulations

• CH11, UNIBUS device
• QBCHNI, QBUS device
• CH10, PDP-10 I/O bus device

• KLH10 simulates a CH11
• SIMH's KS10, PDP-11, and VAX simulate a CH11
• SIMH's KA10 and KL10 simulates a CH10

External links

• AI memo 628 - Includes chapters on ITS, TOPS-20, Lisp Machine, and Unix implementations. See [4] for a HTML version of the memo.
• SYSDOC;CHAORD > - Initial design
• MOON;AMBER > - Another Moon document, early version of AI Memo 628.
• Chaosnet - Detailed descriptions of both the hardware system, and the protociol(s)
• CHAOS; - hardware interface designs, etc.
  • CHAOS;CHAOS PLANS - interesting details of the physical installation at MIT
• Chaosnet wiki - central site for a global emulated Chaosnet