OT: reminiscing for obsolete ethernet

[Kyle Hutson]

If anyone would like some cards, I have a salvage box with a range of
network cards, including the BNC connected and some strange ones which
have a 'D' type connector as well. You're welcome to them if you pay
the postage (from London)...

WARNING! If you do this there will be *somebody* out there who just may
turn you over to the looney bin for wanting these. ;-)

I maintain that the "good old days" are a misnomer in the IT field.

[Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI]

On Monday 11 October 2010, my mailbox was graced by a missive

If anyone would like some cards, I have a salvage box with a range of
network cards, including the BNC connected and some strange ones which
have a 'D' type connector as well. You're welcome to them if you pay
the postage (from London)...

WARNING! If you do this there will be somebody out there who just may
turn you over to the looney bin for wanting these. ;-)
I maintain that the "good old days" are a misnomer in the IT field.

OTOH, I just love the look on their young faces when they are told of the
console of the IBM1620 I started with, which sported in the middle a manometer
red-zoned below 6 kg per square cm, and a big notice to the operator to
initiate an immediate emergency shutdown if the needle entered the red zone.

(Measured the pressure of the water cooling the vacuum tubes)

Cheers,

Ron.

[Administrator]

Post by Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI

If anyone would like some cards, I have a salvage box with a range of
network cards, including the BNC connected and some strange ones which
have a 'D' type connector as well. You're welcome to them if you pay
the postage (from London)...

WARNING! If you do this there will be somebody out there who just may
turn you over to the looney bin for wanting these. ;-)
I maintain that the "good old days" are a misnomer in the IT field.

OTOH, I just love the look on their young faces when they are told of the
console of the IBM1620 I started with, which sported in the middle a manometer
red-zoned below 6 kg per square cm, and a big notice to the operator to
initiate an immediate emergency shutdown if the needle entered the red zone.
(Measured the pressure of the water cooling the vacuum tubes)

Or you explain that TTY is teletype and it had big round buttons with 1cm
travel which would damage your fingers because you had to thump the keys so
they registered ...

Or that you could debug programs by watching the flashing lights on the
front panel ...

David

[t***@public.gmane.org]

Post by Kyle Hutson

If anyone would like some cards, I have a salvage box with a range of
network cards, including the BNC connected and some strange ones which
have a 'D' type connector as well. You're welcome to them if you pay

WARNING! If you do this there will be *somebody* out there who just may
turn you over to the looney bin for wanting these. ;-)
I maintain that the "good old days" are a misnomer in the IT field.

HaHa! I'm with ya' there ;) I dabbled in vintage computing for a
while. Had a PDP 11/35 I was restoring in mom's basement in 1986-ish,
and 1970s/80s micros in storage till a few years ago. Toggling octal to
binary bootstrap code would probably still come naturally.

Mostly I look back at the incredibly tiny performance and storage of
that junk and wonder WHY THE HELL we bothered?!

-RW

[r***@public.gmane.org]

I have a salvage box with a range of
network cards, including the BNC connected and some strange ones which
have a 'D' type connector as well.

The nine-pin D connector would be Token Ring. I think they had a differential
Tx pair and a diff. Rx pair on the four pins closest to the outside.
These cards are probably either Madge, Olicom or IBM and, if they are
newer varieties, might be marked "4/16" for the two classes of Ring Speed
that were used, in MBit/s.

The use of 15 pin D connectors was for the AUI standard (Attachment Unit
Interface) and these appeared usually on transceivers that used to
connect to 10Base5 (half inch thick orange coax cable) or on some of the
VME-bus network cards (Motorola) that were used in 19-slot VME crates.

The 15 pin D also used diff. Tx, diff. Rx, a pair for Collision
Detect, and a pair for DC power. An example of a transceiver was the
Cabletron ST-500 that used the "vampire tap" scheme.

Any physical fault on the backbone (the 5 in 10Base5 stood for 500
meters length) would bring the entire network down and the only way
to find the fault was to look at every tap point, or use a TDR and
'sweep' the line from one end. You had unauthorized users installing
their own taps, often without using the proper 'coring tool' (cut a hole
in the braid for the stinger tap) and the loose braid would short the coax.

Ah, the 'good old days' ... - Bob