[HECnet] Towards the Mouth of Madness....

[Jason Stevens]

real network switches, and faster computer  buses  certainly helped there too....   Then there was that 'PC in the server room' thing that happened.... It was insane they'd sell 100Mbit cards on  buses  that could barely go above 10 or 33mbit.

2011/7/12 Kari Uusim  ki <uusimaki at exdecfinland.org>


Yes, absolutely! The bandwith was 98% of the nominal value. Ethernet starts diminshing after 60%.

I did extensive testing of FDDI back in early -90's and put as much load on it as I could with about a dozen Alphas of the time and found out that it easily outperformed Ethernet.
FDDI gear were more expensive than Ethernet, but were more useful.

FDDI was really outperformed by GbE as the multiplexed 100Mbit/s wasn't available on so many platforms.


Kari



On 13.7.2011 0:29, hvlems at zonnet.nl wrote:
It took HP until 2006 to replace the FDDI lan with ethernet technolgy.
The fault tolerance of FDDI and the build quality of DEC's gigaswitch
products.
The bandwidth of FDDI is a lot better than fast ethernet.
Hans

Verzonden vanaf mijn draadloze BlackBerry  -toestel

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*From: * Joe Ferraro <jferraro at gmail.com>
*Sender: * owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE
*Date: *Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:12:02 -0400
*To: *<hecnet at update.uu.se>
*ReplyTo: * hecnet at Update.UU.SE
*Subject: *Re: [HECnet] Towards the Mouth of Madness....


Off topic... I received a page, a few weeks prior, on a machine that was
not pinging. Turns out, it was one of a few old NOVA class boxes we
still have at my work,   using FDDI for connectivity. Fortunately, a
disconnect / reconnect brought the ring back online; I was scared (and a
bit excited in a strange way) for a few moments that I was going to have
to do some extensive troubleshooting... FDDI still lives.

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 4:27 PM, H Vlems <hvlems at zonnet.nl

<mailto:hvlems at zonnet.nl>> wrote:

     __

     Remember what I wrote: this happened nearly two decades ago.____

     IP is the protocol that survived and most people aren   t even aware
     what happened on local area networks before, say,1998.____

     I worked for Fuji, photosensitive films, paper and offset printing
     products.____

     Most of the IT equipment was made by DEC: PDP-11   s (/44, /84, /93,
     /24, /73 and /23), VAXes, an IBM mainframe (4081) and PC   s.____

     And lots of other gear, most of it in the research lab. A Motorola
     box that ran Motorola Unix, and an RS/6000 under AIX 2.4 (?).____

     The lingua franca was DECnet and LAT. No IP, though some PC   s used
     Novell and SNA over tokenring to make terminal emulation to the
     mainframe possible.____

     No IP.   Sounds weird in today   s world but DECnet eventually
     connected everything. We got a **very** early Cisco router that did
     level 1____

     DECnet routing between the corporate ethernet and the finance dept
     token ring. Another (DEC) box that routed DECnet over Datanet/1
     (that   s X25 in Europe IIRC). The mainframe used an SNA/DECnet
     gateway (the big channel attached box).____

     The RS/6000 and the Motorola systems also ran DECnet, endnode only.____

     To make this a little interesting we ran the first FDDI network in
     the Netherlands.____

     Trouble shooting wasn   t always easy, especially if the SNA/DECnet
     gateway was involved!____

     Hans____

     __ __

     ------------------------------------------------------------------------

     *Van:*owner-__hecnet at Update.UU.SE <mailto:hecnet at Update.UU.SE>__
     [mailto:owner- <mailto:owner->__hecnet at Update.UU.SE
     <mailto:hecnet at Update.UU.SE>__] *Namens *Jason Stevens

     *Verzonden:* dinsdag, juli 2011 21:10
     *Aan:* hecnet at update.uu.se <mailto:hecnet at update.uu.se>

     *Onderwerp:* Re: [HECnet] Towards the Mouth of Madness....____

     __ __

     AIX and decnet? now that'd be ... non conformist & fun! ____

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