20 Jan
2014
20 Jan
'14
9:37 a.m.
On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
Just throwing this out to see what other people
think.
I suspect we're at the tail end of the usage life of devices that don't
speak IP.
I'm mostly thinking about networking devices 80's > 00's
So, what needs to be preserved?
Since I used to manufacture gear that spoke HASP and 3780 (and since
those protocols go back decades), I'd propose preserving data/example
hardware that used IBM's bisync protocols.
I know COMBOARDs were popular with large government-funded labs (LLNL,
LANL, Sandia National Labs, Harry Diamond Labs...), as well as with
the oil exploration sector, and a few other niches - basically places
where people had a VAX or PDP-11 and needed to exchange files in
different cities with a large IBM box. The final niche was in the
early 1990s when 3780 was the favored transport layer for EDI files
(when it was still EDI-via-dialup before EDI-over-IP).
I suspect that most people won't see much value in preserving bisync
knowledge and hardware, but in my biased experience, there was a lot
of it in the pre-TCP/IP world.
-ethan