On 10/14/11 9:46 AM, Al Kossow wrote: Interesting bit of trivia. It appears that BIX started on an Arete 1200 Byte Oct 1986 page 6 BUILDING BIX WITH MICROS It will come as no surprise to BYTE readers that we're building the BYTE Information Exchange (BIX) with microcomputers. Since research conducted among a sample of subscribers shows we may need to support more than 1000 simultaneous users within a year, BIX represents an exciting challenge to microcomputer and networking technology. We thought you might like to know how a group of outstanding technical people is helping us face this challenge. The first and most important step was to select the microcomputers and the operating system. Many powerful microcomputers are available. Clearly our application will place tremendous demands on the I/O system of whatever machines we use. Three members of McGraw-Hill's top technical unit. Jon Osser, Bill Coleman, and Mike Shareck, with a big assist from McGraw-Hill's chief scientist. corporate vice president Bill Raduchel. surveyed the marketplace and chose the Arete 1200, which was designed for I/O-intensive operations and runs ARIX, Arete's version of UNIX System V. Arete's chief designer, Ernie Rae!. has created a remarkable I/O engine. The Arete 1200 has up to 4 "tightly coupled" 12.5-MHz 68000s acting as CPUs. These 68000s have a common multiported main memory shared through the 32 -bit processor memory bus and can process up to 2.8 million instructions per second. Each CPU has its own 4 K-byte cache and no wait states when in cache. Main memory expands as high as 16 megabytes. In addition to the 68000s serving as CPUs, the system can accommodate up to 12 more 68000s, each on an I/O card that has eight serial ports. The I/O processor cards each have dualport RAM that is memory-mapped in the master CPU's address space for communication with the CPU. The Arete 1200 has four separate 32-bit buses: the interprocessor communication bus, the processor memory bus, the utility-transfer bus, and the data-transfer bus; The data-transfer bus is 32 bits wide and moves data at 33.3 megabytes per second. The system can support four ESMD (extended storage module device) peripherals simultaneously reading and/ or writing main memory. When fully loaded, the Arete 1200 can support as many as 88 simultaneous users. Mass storage can be expanded to 9 gigabytes. Phase one of BIX starts in Boston and will use an Arete 1200 to support 88 simultaneous users. The performance goal is to have. any BIX member's communication (conference comment or private mail message) available to appropriate parties within a few seconds. Phase two, probably underway by the time you read this, will link three Arete 1200s to support 250 simultaneous users. The Aretes are linked by devoting one I/O slot in each machine to Arete's Multibus adapter and Excelan's EXOS201 Ethernet card for Multibus. The EXOS201 has a local processor, an Ethernet controller, local memory, and an implementation of levels I, 2, and 3 of the ISO network standard. In this phase, each. of the three Aretes will maintain fully redundant database copies. Updates will be broadcast to all three machines. A process running on each machine will carry out the updates. Phase three is where things get really interesting. As Ernie Rael says, "The project is state of the art, so we'll have to learn the optimal solution:' In this phase, the network will become transparent. Arete will provide an operating-system interface that allows BIX to access files on any machine in the network as if all files were in one system. The transparent network will be based on the Sun Network File System (NFS). a virtual file system that allows files to reside on any system in the net. Arete is altering the kernel to ARIX to support the transparent file access of NFS. If Arete succeeds in networking 12 to I 5 machines in a way that provides access to files on any machine within a few seconds, the time-sharing scene will be altered forever, and BYTE will have succeeded in building BIX while remaining true to its microcomputer heritage. Phase four will build the system above 1000 simultaneous users. In this phase, the BlX conferencing software (the University of Guelph's CoSy) will understand more about its environment. Co$y author Al Mayer, a key figure throughout the growth of BIX, will get to explore his ideas for distributed conferencing. Plans for phase four must remain fluid until we've learned all we can from the. previous phases. Can'" microcomputer technology succeed in linking the microcomputers of BYTE's readers throughout the United States and Canada, and then Europe and Japan? We hope and believe it can. We will fall back on mainframe technology if we' must. but we thought you'd want us to try to build BIX this way first. TI'ying to build such a large-scale communications system with supermicrocomputers is a venturesome and innovative project. We are sure to encounter some road- -blocks. But the history of microcomputers is full of roadblocks with big signs reading "Not Possible with Microcomputers:.',We find this challenge irresistible. If you want to monitor oui--'progress-day by day, join BIX and have a look. If not. we'll keep you posted in the pages of BYTE. -Phil Lemmons, Editor in Chief

On 10/14/11 9:46 AM, Al Kossow wrote: Byte Mar 1987 BIX, the BYTE Information Exchange, now has more than 12,000 users, the estimated capacity for the 1986 Arete supermicrocomputer running BIX. The system continues to perform well despite the heavy work load, but it is clear that the hardware must be expanded dramatically to support the substantial growth planned for 1987 and beyond. Indeed, we stopped promotional mailings for several months in order to avoid swamping the current 88-port BIX system. We will replace the system with a new one capable of supporting 250 simultaneous users, with NFS (network file server) networking capability to provide for expansion to even greater size. Approximately 20 companies were invited to submit proposals for the next generation of BIX hardware, and most did so. Bidders were required to submit hardware configurations permitting growth to 500 and then 1000 simultaneous users. As of this writing, the number of bidders has been narrowed to four by our technical team at McGraw-Hill in New York. Two supermicrocomputer companies and two superminicomputer companies remain in contention. We are installing BIX software on all the remaining contenders and running simulations of various user loads. By the time you read this, we should have selected a vendor and be in the process of installing the new system. If we should encounter performance problems before the new system is up, rest assured that hardware capacity will soon triple

Thanks for the uploads, Al. I'll check them out. Interesting reading re: BIX, too. Anyone know any other shops that used these machines? -- Jht On 10/17/11, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: -- Sent from my mobile device silent700.blogspot.com Retrocomputing and collecting in the Chicago area: http://chiclassiccomp.org