i860: Re: modern stuff

[William Donzelli]

> 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