HECnet May 2013

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38 participants
680 discussions

OT: old Ciscos, was Re: [HECnet] Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World

by b4＠gewt.net

On Fri, 24 May 2013, Gregg Levine wrote: On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 12:48 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: On 05/24/2013 12:43 PM, Gregg Levine wrote: Funny you should mention the keyword NuBus in your presentation. Yes the Apple Mac II machines used it. They licensed it from TI, who developed it while exploring the wonders of Lisp. Anyone here remember the Lisp Machines that were extremely popular once? Oh yes, I have several of them here, all Symbolics. A 3640, 3645, and an XL1201. One was made by TI. And it used that expansion bus. Yes, the TI Explorer. I hadn't remembered that that was where NuBus came from. Neat. Then it's less of a happenstance thing that Cisco used it, given their Lisp connections back then. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA Hello! Okay then. ----- **Those machines are being used by something big and orange wearing cheap sneakers, to support a massive delivery of bad data on a network nearby.** The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes? ;) ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

12 years, 1 month

OT: old Ciscos, was Re: [HECnet] Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

On 05/24/2013 07:00 PM, Peter Lothberg wrote: Funny you should mention the keyword NuBus in your presentation. Yes the Apple Mac II machines used it. They licensed it from TI, who developed it while exploring the wonders of Lisp. Anyone here remember the Lisp Machines that were extremely popular once? Oh yes, I have several of them here, all Symbolics. A 3640, 3645, and an XL1201. One was made by TI. And it used that expansion bus. Yes, the TI Explorer. I hadn't remembered that that was where NuBus came from. Neat. Then it's less of a happenstance thing that Cisco used it, given their Lisp connections back then. ??? There is no NuBus in cisco land... There is PCI (VIP/7200 port adapters) I believe it was you yourself who introduced me to Cbus and explained that it was a NuBus implementation, at Digex in '93, I think when you brought us that IGS with some pre-release code on it to do our first real BGP peering. I would be happy to stand corrected, however. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

12 years, 1 month

OT: old Ciscos, was Re: [HECnet] Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2013-05-24 19:00, Peter Lothberg wrote: On 05/24/2013 12:43 PM, Gregg Levine wrote: Funny you should mention the keyword NuBus in your presentation. Yes the Apple Mac II machines used it. They licensed it from TI, who developed it while exploring the wonders of Lisp. Anyone here remember the Lisp Machines that were extremely popular once? Oh yes, I have several of them here, all Symbolics. A 3640, 3645, and an XL1201. One was made by TI. And it used that expansion bus. Yes, the TI Explorer. I hadn't remembered that that was where NuBus came from. Neat. Then it's less of a happenstance thing that Cisco used it, given their Lisp connections back then. ??? There is no NuBus in cisco land... There is PCI (VIP/7200 port adapters) Maybe someone can tell me what the connection is between Cisco and Lisp as well, because I missed that one too... (All I know is the connection between Cisco and PDP-10s) Johnny

12 years, 1 month

Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World

by b4＠gewt.net

On Fri, 24 May 2013, Dave McGuire wrote: On 05/24/2013 08:58 AM, Clem Cole wrote: I fear a sad part of this slide show is that many of us remember and were part of it all. Some of us programmed these machines (I admit that I still have some of these pieces in my basement). I was disappointed they did not show a "stinger tap." The picture of the Alto shows the first mouse the Hawley Labs mechanical mouse (which I miss for its feel). Check out the picture of the first Cisco router using Intel Multibus (with a Motorola 68k in it) looking so awkward. http://www.eweek.com/networking/slideshows/ethernet-marks-40-years-linking-… Speaking of which, I am now back in touch with my former employer and mentor. I may have mentioned him before; I worked for him ~25 years ago and learned a great deal from him, but we'd subsequently lost touch. Many years before we met, he was the chairman of IEEE committee 802.3. Before that, he was one of the developers of OS/360. He sounds like a very interesting guy. I'm going to go to NJ to visit him soon; I'll see if he has any of his 802.3 slides or conference materials left. It would be very interesting if he still had some! -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

12 years, 1 month

OT: old Ciscos, was Re: [HECnet] Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World

by roll＠Stupi.SE

On 05/24/2013 12:43 PM, Gregg Levine wrote: Funny you should mention the keyword NuBus in your presentation. Yes the Apple Mac II machines used it. They licensed it from TI, who developed it while exploring the wonders of Lisp. Anyone here remember the Lisp Machines that were extremely popular once? Oh yes, I have several of them here, all Symbolics. A 3640, 3645, and an XL1201. One was made by TI. And it used that expansion bus. Yes, the TI Explorer. I hadn't remembered that that was where NuBus came from. Neat. Then it's less of a happenstance thing that Cisco used it, given their Lisp connections back then. ??? There is no NuBus in cisco land... There is PCI (VIP/7200 port adapters) -P

12 years, 1 month

OT: old Ciscos, was Re: [HECnet] Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2013-05-24 18:48, Dave McGuire wrote: On 05/24/2013 12:43 PM, Gregg Levine wrote: Funny you should mention the keyword NuBus in your presentation. Yes the Apple Mac II machines used it. They licensed it from TI, who developed it while exploring the wonders of Lisp. Anyone here remember the Lisp Machines that were extremely popular once? Oh yes, I have several of them here, all Symbolics. A 3640, 3645, and an XL1201. Speaking of which... Update have (had?) a Symbolics machine (might have been a 3640). Back when I was poking at it some, I found that there was DECnet for the Symbolics machines, but I never managed to locate that. Anyone who happen to have it? Johnny

12 years, 1 month

OT: old Ciscos, was Re: [HECnet] Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World

by gregg.drwho8＠gmail.com

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 12:48 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: On 05/24/2013 12:43 PM, Gregg Levine wrote: Funny you should mention the keyword NuBus in your presentation. Yes the Apple Mac II machines used it. They licensed it from TI, who developed it while exploring the wonders of Lisp. Anyone here remember the Lisp Machines that were extremely popular once? Oh yes, I have several of them here, all Symbolics. A 3640, 3645, and an XL1201. One was made by TI. And it used that expansion bus. Yes, the TI Explorer. I hadn't remembered that that was where NuBus came from. Neat. Then it's less of a happenstance thing that Cisco used it, given their Lisp connections back then. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA Hello! Okay then. ----- **Those machines are being used by something big and orange wearing cheap sneakers, to support a massive delivery of bad data on a network nearby.** ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

12 years, 1 month

OT: old Ciscos, was Re: [HECnet] Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

12 years, 1 month

OT: old Ciscos, was Re: [HECnet] Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World

by roll＠Stupi.SE

Peter will correct me if I'm wrong here, but the word on the street was that when the new "flagship" Cisco 7000 was introduced, its routing performance was lackluster compared to a well-configured AGS+, which caused some issues with 7000 adoption. Later 7000-family hardware enhancements corrected those performance issues. A cisco 7000 (router) is a AGS+ with Cbus2 painted green..... The SC is a Cbus controller and it still has a multibus. Tony's silicon switch engine is a trinary-tree-host-route lookup engine with packet buffer that replaced the SC.. In 7500 the multibus was finally gone. It still has the Cbus chanel structure now renabed to CX and later CY bus but now the buffer and switching is done on the CPU named RSP.. The Mips R4000 is doing packet switching with a hand-written code path on the 7500.. Packets go across the cbus/cxbus twice, in and out and the DMA engine is on the linecards. The buffer memory is named "memd" and the 12000 is a bigger 7500 with a switch, but it still has "memd" on the RP to porcess packets to/from the box itself... -P

12 years, 1 month

OT: old Ciscos, was Re: [HECnet] Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World

by gregg.drwho8＠gmail.com

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 12:33 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: On 05/24/2013 08:58 AM, Clem Cole wrote: I fear a sad part of this slide show is that many of us remember and were part of it all. Some of us programmed these machines (I admit that I still have some of these pieces in my basement). I was disappointed they did not show a "stinger tap." The picture of the Alto shows the first mouse the Hawley Labs mechanical mouse (which I miss for its feel). Check out the picture of the first Cisco router using Intel Multibus (with a Motorola 68k in it) looking so awkward. That's a Cisco AGS or AGS+. I've deployed a bunch of those, and ran one for my home T1 for a long time (back when that was a lot of bandwidth!), and I still have one here, but it's about to get shipped out to Josh Dersch in Washington as part of a swap deal. But I still have an MGS and a CGS, which are the same thing but smaller chassis with fewer slots. Multibus, yes...but that's not the worst of it! Some here are no doubt familiar with NuBus, which is generally known as the expansion slot bus of the Apple Macintosh II. It's not an Apple bus, however! I don't recall where it hails from, but it's a general purpose bus, and a pretty nice one at that. Anyway, the difference between the AGS and the AGS+ is that the AGS+ card cage has a second backplane, with DIN-style triple-row connectors, where the Multibus P2 card-edge connectors would normally go. That's the Cbus, a 32-bit-wide bus operating at something like 16MHz, quite a bit faster than the Multibus interconnect. A Cbus Controller card was plugged in, which acted as a bridge between Multibus and Cbus. The Cbus Controller had a bit of very fast packet memory, and a purpose-built microcoded processor to handle communications. Packet memory was slotted dynamically at configuration time, divided up by the MTU settings on the attached interfaces. It was a very nice system; highly capable and very flexible. Peter will correct me if I'm wrong here, but the word on the street was that when the new "flagship" Cisco 7000 was introduced, its routing performance was lackluster compared to a well-configured AGS+, which caused some issues with 7000 adoption. Later 7000-family hardware enhancements corrected those performance issues. To drag this kicking and screaming to on-topicness...I'm sure someone here can tell the story of where ciscoSystems came from, more or less as a cash cow that eventually resulted in the founding of XKL. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA Hello! Funny you should mention the keyword NuBus in your presentation. Yes the Apple Mac II machines used it. They licensed it from TI, who developed it while exploring the wonders of Lisp. Anyone here remember the Lisp Machines that were extremely popular once? One was made by TI. And it used that expansion bus. Eventually they also made up the boards as support hardware for the Mac. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

12 years, 1 month

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HECnet May 2013