-----Original Message-----
From: ethan.dicks at
gmail.com
Sent: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 12:37:08 -0500
To: cctalk at
classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: What to preserve from the pre-IP era
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
And then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have all of those
funky network 'things' (hardware and software)that were in vogue
during the dawn of the office LAN: 3Com 3+Share and friends,
3Com EtherSeries, early NetWare and their peculiar fileservers,
ArcNet, BrokenRing, etc., etc. etc. Not a TCP/IP packet to be
found anywhere here (at least, not until much later...).
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