1 Nov
2018
1 Nov
'18
12:22 p.m.
6611 was the commercialized version. One early model was a standard 7012
desktop with the special cards. A later cost optimized version had a custom
PowerPC backplane.
There were some good pics of the nsfnet T3 racks I linked onto nekochan
forums but that site is gone. Wish people would migrate back to Usenet.
On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 9:15 AM William Donzelli via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
So, what is
this i960-based card for?
They were the routers. At the core nodes of the network, there would
be a big RS/6000s (very early POWER1 types) that would each do about
4-5 high speed interfaces (FDDI, HSSI, and 10base2). Each interface
was one of these cards, so each of the big RS/6000s would have about
4-5 of these cards.
IBM tried to commercialize the design, but it was doomed - the routing
engines were very fast, but the internet quickly outgrew the
architecture of the engines, and they apparently needed a complete
redesign to compete. IBM did release very few of these RS/6000s to the
public (I think RS/6000-320Hs with a fancy tag - machine type 6767?).
I have only seen one of these routers in the wild, but most of the
real NSFnet ones (I was decommissioning them, one time with a Sawzall
because of some live tangled cables).
Could it be related to what you
say in your post?
https://imgur.com/NIvQPBv
Possibly related, but that card is not one of the NSFnet ones.
--
Will