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."