i860: Re: modern stuff

[Kevin Bowling]

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
>