[MisterTea]

There's also Bell Labs IL - Internet Link - used to speed up 9P links for Plan 9 over LANs. https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/il/

And this brings me to why I love networking on Plan 9. First off the dial string, net!address!service, passes the network along with the address and service port letting you easily switch protocols as needed. e.g. a program could listen on IL port 666 using the dial string il!*!666 and the client dials il!10.1.1.1!666. Second, that lets you dial and listen on any protocol from any program. If one wanted to use raw Ethernet you use the dial string ether0!aabbccddeeff. If I wanted to add a protocol like quic or a dead one like ipx/spx I just need to mount it to /net and keep the semantics the same as other services in net and any program can dial that protocol - ezpz user space networking stacks. Powerful abstraction.

[kjs3]

Reminds me a bit of UUCP or AT&T Datakit addressing.

[MisterTea]

Datakit was in fact one of the early supported networks in Plan 9. You could dial into a 9 machine over datakit, mount an outward facing IP stack over your /net and your on-line: http://man.postnix.pw/plan_9_2e/3/datakit

[kjs3]

Interesting, and I suppose not surprising given the source. AT&T kept on with Datakit long after circuit switched data networking became passe.