Author: Ari Rabinowitz

In my last post I mentioned “DecNet Terminal Servers” which connected the dumb terminals to the big Vaxen in the Whippany datacenter. Those terminal servers actually used LAT, which was a Dec proprietary protocol to connect the dumb terminals to the Vaxen. Shortly after I got to Bear Stearns someone in the purchasing department discovered that they could purchase terminal servers which spoke LAT for less than the cost of the Dec terminal servers. These other terminal servers also spoke telnet over TCP/IP, so that the same dumb terminals could be used to connect to the Amdahls and Sun Microsystems servers. Unfortunately those terminal servers needed DNS to resolve the names to IP addresses and there weren’t any DNS servers at Bear Stearns. At the time, the Unix boxes were using NIS, which was then known as Sun’s Yellow Pages (YP).

I was able to get a TCP/IP stack for VMS from a company called TGV (Two Guys and a Vax, not to be confused with the French high speed railroad). In addition to the TCP/IP stack TGV also supplied versions of standard Unix utilities like Bind (the standard DNS server) and Sendmail (the standard SMTP server). Sendmail allowed me to connect the VMS Email system to Sun Unix Email, cc:Mail on the PCs and Profs on the mainframes. Bind let me run a DNS server on one of our spare VaxStations. The issue was creating the zone files (the lists which relate the host names to their IP addresses). There were hundreds of hosts and maintaining the Bind zone files by hand was not feasible. Back in the days before the Internet, people shared information and programs via Usenet over UUCP. As I mentioned in my first post, Email in those days was delivered overnight. I won’t go into details about UUCP and Usenet in this post, but Wikipedia has articles on many of these topics. Usenet newsgroups were also transmitted via UUCP overnight and they allowed people to share information about programs and other issues. When I went looking for a program to convert Unix host files into Bind zone files I discovered that there was a program named h2n which consisted of several thousand lines of AWK code but was very flexible. To get the program I had to send an Email to several FTPmail servers asking for a list of available programs to see which server had h2n. Then I had to send an Email to the proper FTPmail server asking it to send me the program. In those days, programs came as several Email messages which had to be concatenated together to make a shell script which created the file (or files) needed to run the program. All in all it took several days to get the program. Once I had the program I set up a scheduled job to run ypcat to save a copy of the NIS (YP) hosts map to a file, then I ran h2n against that hosts file to create the needed forward (name to IP address) and reverse (IP address to name) zone files. Those files were then copied to a VMS VaxStation (fixt31 sitting under my desk) which was running Bind and that was used by the new terminal servers to map the names to IP addresses. That was the first DNS server at Bear Stearns, and remained the master DNS server for many years.

Enough for today, I hope to get another post out in the next week or two. That one will be a break from my Bear Stearns past. I hope to write about a recent project I was working on.

But first, Holly suggested I left out two pieces of information from the last posting so I’ll give you those. The first is how to say the name of this blog. In ‘techspeak’ the exclamation mark is called a ‘bang’, so my early Email address at Bear Stearns, as well as this blog, is sol bang ursa bang ari. The second piece of information that Holly said I should include is for those of you who have forgotten your Latin or your constellations. Ursa is Latin for bear, so the computer which was the UUCP gateway to Bear Stearns was called bear.

Speaking of Bear Stearns, back in 1988 when the head-hunter told me he was sending me for an interview at Bear Stearns I thought it was a streaking club. If you don’t get that, ask in the comments and I or someone else will explain it.

I was hired by the IT department at Bear Stearns to support the Fixed Income trading floor, specifically Pete the new head of mortgage research. My initial assignment was to install a network of VaxStations running VMS for the traders, research analysts and developers. There were already a few VaxStations around the 4th (FI trading) and 5th (FI research) floors at 245 Park Ave., but most of the people had dumb DEC (VT320 or color VT340) terminals connected via DecNet Terminal Servers to the big Vaxen in the Whippany datacenter, along with several smaller green Quotron screens. On my first day on the job I found about 15 VaxStation 3200’s still on their pallets on the 5th floor, waiting for me to unpack them and install them around the group. The VaxStation 3200’s were desk-side units, about the size of a radiator in a typical NYC pre-war apartment, so they were difficult to install on the crowded 4th floor trading desks, but we managed to fit a few in, along with their 19 inch color CRT monitors which weighed about 70 pounds. DEC soon came out with their VaxStation 3100 model, which was a desktop model more the size of a pizza box, so we ordered lots of those. Pete didn’t want his people to be able to take their software or data home with them on the 3-1/2 inch floppy disks which came standard with the VaxStation 3100’s, but DEC didn’t sell a preconfigured 3100 without the floppy drive, so he ordered diskless computers and then ordered SCSI controllers and 2 disks for each computer. That meant that I had to install the hardware and the software on each of the stations before it could be used. The 3100’s all came with thin-wire Ethernet, basically coaxial cable BNC connectors which allowed them to be easily networked together. They also each came with a phillips-head screwdriver for assembly. I was able to install the controller cards and disks into the servers, then daisy-chain them together with the coaxial cable and connect them to one VaxStation which had the software installed. I wrote some scripts to automatically install the software, setting the DecNet address for each computer based on the MAC address of the Ethernet interface so that they each got unique address and since the boxes had the MAC addresses I was able to give each one a unique name tied to the address. All of this is standard now, but in those days it was a fairly new idea. I set up the configuration table of MAC addresses and names, then started the script and left for the night. The next morning I would come in to a half-dozen new workstations ready to be installed on the desks. I used a simple naming convention based on the use of the computer and a sequence number, so the ones I installed were called boring names like fixd02 for a developer workstation or fixt31 for a trader workstation. The earlier VaxStations had more interesting names. The ones running VMS were named for denizens of the sea (fluke, mako, squid, etc.) while the ones running Ultrix (DEC’s proprietary Unix variant) were named for birds who ate denizens of the sea (osprey, heron, etc.). Interestingly enough, the Ultrix group eventually gave up and those boxes were reimaged with VMS, so the sea denizens ended up eating their predators.

Shortly before I got to 245 Park Ave. Bear Stearns’ networking group had started to run fiber to the trading desks so each workstation that I installed had to have a fiber to Ethernet transceiver attached. In those days, the standard Ethernet connector, when not using the thin-wire BNC connectors, was a 15 pin slide-lock connector, but Bear Stearns decided to replace all of the slide-locks with screw-down connectors because of a mishap with a Sun Workstation on the equities trading desk. I only heard about that third-hand so I won’t go into it here.

There’s lots more from these early days, some of which I still remember, but I’ll save more for another post. I hope this didn’t bore too many of you too much.