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

[Joe Ferraro]

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> 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:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] Namens Jason Stevens   Verzonden: dinsdag, juli 2011 21:10   Aan: hecnet at update.uu.se   Onderwerp: Re: [HECnet] Towards the Mouth of Madness....
  
AIX and decnet? now that'd be ... non conformist & fun!

Geen virus gevonden in dit bericht.   Gecontroleerd door AVG - www.avg.com   Versie: 10.0.1388 / Virusdatabase: 1516/3760 - datum van uitgifte: 07/12/11