Retro networking / WAN communities

[Dave Mitton]

Texas Instruments was the first second source to create a Token Ring chipset, the TMS380.   When we pointed out to them some the IBM’ism features we’d prefer to be fixed for 802.x compatibility  they claimed they couldn’t because of legal agreements with IBM.   The TI chipset had other issues and was not register compatible with IBM’s implementation.

Later IBM worked with National Semiconductor to release the TROPIC chipset that was used by Madge and others. 
Some info I found here:   https://www.ardent-tool.com/NIC/TROPIC.html

Dave.

Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2022 20:25:25 +0000
From: Wayne S <wayne.sudol at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Retro networking / WAN communities

There is some mention of Token Ring vs Ethernet here. IIRC, One issue that was pointed out was that IBM was the only single source for TR chips so the price of token ring could be kept artificially high. Was there ever a second or third source for token ring chips?

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 12, 2022, at 14:11, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> ?On 4/12/22 3:03 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
>> I'll bow to the experts and refer to the things as a "boxes with <fill in the blank>n capabilities".
> 
> I'm definitely not an expert.  Just some random <REDACTED descriptive term> on the Internet who has things to say.  ;-)
> 
>> That should pretty much cover the terrain.
> 
> As some random <REDACTED descriptive term> on the Internet who has things to say I actually value "boxes with <fill in the blank>n capabilities" as it lets me know if I should treat the <fill in the blank> as a specific thing or a generic class description.  E.g. Hoover brand vs Eureka hoover device.  ;-)
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die

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