On This Day in Linux 1995-07-04
Looks like today was a big release day for TNOS!.
TNOS was a program based on another program called NOS. This was written by Phil Karn, KA9Q. He was a US radio Ham who worked for Bell Labs & Qualcomm I beleive. Essentially NOS (and TNOS) allowed you to create an IP network with your computer and a special modem (called a TNC), which interfaced your VHF/UHF radio to your computer. Large networks were created by hobbyists around the world, which we used to pass TCP traffic over these networks. This was a class A, network 44.0.0.0/8 refered to as the AMPRnet 1.
Below you can see my stack of TNC’s to the right of the photo (from around 1996) with the radios they are connected to, to the middle and left.
The AMPRnet was a large TCP/IP network which predates the public ‘Internet’ . In 2019 half of the class A network allocation was sold off to Amazon AWS due to a shortage of IPv4 addressing. ↩︎