i860: Re: modern stuff

[William Donzelli]

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