i860: Re: modern stuff

[Kevin Bowling]

Yes, they are. There are reference to those machines in the various
nsfnet written histories but not cross linkage to those great
pictures.
On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 2:57 PM William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Right, thanks. 6611 is correct. I do not think the FDDI or HSSI cards
> made it into those.
>
> The RCS/RI twitter feed has some pictures of NSFnet racks and a F960
> FDDI card. Those were from the GNJ node in Greensboro Junction, NC.
> Were those the pictures?
>
> https://twitter.com/RetroCompSocRI
>
> --
> Will
> On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 3:22 PM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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