Hi getwnet,
Hmmmm....
I am not intimately familiar with DECnet or "THE" DECnet spec.
A top level spec. for DECnet would probably be useful for this group and I am MOST interested?
Getting stuff to run reliably especially over the long term seems to me to be THE problem.
My little RF net is working pretty well. That said, the 'bulletproof' chips don't seem to be that reliable. I have observed a variety of unexplained glitches. Some seem to be chip registers changing? Others seem to be 'reset' related. Ugh! What do you do when reset is not itself reliable? Remove power and pray and restart yet again?
I find it most 'interesting' that the reset button on the IBM PC came about from Microsoft's 'bug free' software! Food for thought.
I guess we could all tell some real stories

. And how do you tell a receiver is working let alone working properly?
I think that DECnet's lessons would serve us all well?
My background is telephony. There are some REAL lessons on reliability there

.
Are we having fun yet?
Lots of fun!
Wiz