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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 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

12 years, 6 months

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, 6 months

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, 6 months

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

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2013-05-24 18:20, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote: On May 24, 2013, at 12:15 PM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote: ... So, here are a few photographs of some original Ethernet (10base5) bits I have here -- Etherpipe, AUI cables, and h4000s and h4005s. I put the camera away before I'd realized that I'd not photographed the tap tool. I hope you won't be too disappointed in that. http://tmesis.net/10base5/ Nice. Interesting to see the yellow stuff, I remember that in prototype installations but from what I was told, DEC switched to the brownish/orange teflon jacketed cable for customer shipments. Something to do with flame rating for air handling spaces (i.e., dropped ceiling office areas). I think we still have some yellow coax under the floor, still with transcievers attached, in the hall where Magica and Mim are located. However, the coax is cut somewhere, so it is no longer usable, and I don't think we have DEC transcievers, but I can't remember what we have. Maybe someone could check and take a photo. All of that was installed along with our two DEC-2060s back in the 80s... And it's definitely bright yellow. Johnny

12 years, 6 months

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

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

12 years, 6 months

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 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

12 years, 6 months

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

by Paul_Koning＠Dell.com

On May 24, 2013, at 12:15 PM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote: ... So, here are a few photographs of some original Ethernet (10base5) bits I have here -- Etherpipe, AUI cables, and h4000s and h4005s. I put the camera away before I'd realized that I'd not photographed the tap tool. I hope you won't be too disappointed in that. http://tmesis.net/10base5/ Nice. Interesting to see the yellow stuff, I remember that in prototype installations but from what I was told, DEC switched to the brownish/orange teflon jacketed cable for customer shipments. Something to do with flame rating for air handling spaces (i.e., dropped ceiling office areas). paul

12 years, 6 months

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

by system＠TMESIS.COM

Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> writes: On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- <system at tmesis.com> wrote: h vlems <hvlems at zonnet.nl> writes: Yes, an H4005 was shown but no H4000 I've got some here if you want to see pictures of them. -- VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity. Hello! (I did not see the fact that the original thread was cross-posted to the TUHS list as well as this one, until after the fact.) Now that I'd be interested in seeing. It happens that a shop in Manhattan was collecting and attempting to sell large quantities of Ethernet hardware. And I was the only buyer. It annoyed them that I was both the only buyer and the only one in the space who knew what they were. I wasn't feeling ambitious enough to trudge out the whole lighting "kit and kaboodle" <http://tmesis.net/Photography/Ummagumma.JPG>, so I took a few photos on the kitchen table with the 50mm f/1.2 using the available light from the kitchen window (not much since it's raining). That 50mm f/1.2 is very good in low lighting but it also has a depth of field that is thinner than rice paper, so the bokeh is quite evident in the photos I took. I would have needed the lighting kit to use any of the macros. I hope to someday build a light box so that I can do proper photographs of kit like this. So, here are a few photographs of some original Ethernet (10base5) bits I have here -- Etherpipe, AUI cables, and h4000s and h4005s. I put the camera away before I'd realized that I'd not photographed the tap tool. I hope you won't be too disappointed in that. http://tmesis.net/10base5/ -- VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.

12 years, 6 months

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

by hvlems＠zonnet.nl

I'be installed plenty so no thanks Brian... Van: Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- Verzonden: vrijdag 24 mei 2013 16:26 PM Aan: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Beantwoorden: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Onderwerp: Re: [HECnet] Ethernet Marks 40 Years Linking People, Computers in a Wired World h vlems <hvlems at zonnet.nl> writes: >Yes, an H4005 was shown but no H4000 I've got some here if you want to see pictures of them. -- VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.

12 years, 6 months

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

by gregg.drwho8＠gmail.com

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- <system at tmesis.com> wrote: h vlems <hvlems at zonnet.nl> writes: Yes, an H4005 was shown but no H4000 I've got some here if you want to see pictures of them. -- VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity. Hello! (I did not see the fact that the original thread was cross-posted to the TUHS list as well as this one, until after the fact.) Now that I'd be interested in seeing. It happens that a shop in Manhattan was collecting and attempting to sell large quantities of Ethernet hardware. And I was the only buyer. It annoyed them that I was both the only buyer and the only one in the space who knew what they were. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

12 years, 6 months

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