Sphere papers gone

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Mon Oct 6 06:51:19 1997

> Don't worry, I didn't take it personally! It's just that all too
> often, I can't promise much better for an artifact than that I'll look
> at it, stick it in a folder and then in a file box in my storage
> closet. I'm not real happy about that.

That seems quite reasonable.
 
> I have to admit that I was thinking about those RS/6000s too. But what
> I was thinking were the somewhat more mundane questions of how best to get
> one out here to California, where I would put it once it got here, and
> what I would do with it.

The things are big - they live in the standard 0.75 x 1 x 1.5 meter IBM
box (sometimes known as a 9309) and weigh several hundred pounds. Shipping
to California would be expensive. Oddly enough, the two San Francisco
machines were shipped to RCS/RI. The only other California machines (now
gone) were based in the Los Angeles area.

> Well, with a sufficient number I would be more inclined to put 'em in
> use for their intended purpose -- moving IP datagrams around. But
> there's probably newer hardware to do that sort of thing while not
> needing as much space, cooling, and/or electricity.

The routing is still very impressive - some of the people around
here say they are still the fastest routers made, but suffer in that they
are huge and can only deal with 32,000 networks. IBM decided not to get
into the routing business (the NSF machines have "Experimental IBM Router"
tags on them) - a shame, as it was nice to have a router that was also
a real unix machine.

> OOB modems? Is OOB a brand name or an abbreviation for "out of band"?
 
Exactly. And more fun to say than "out of band".

> Aiyeee, token things! Those also sound interesting, both because
> they're RTs (another thing I'd like to dink with, someday) and because
> of what they did.

For those interested, I think there is a short writeup about the system in
the RT FAQ floating around on the net.

> Speaking of old Internet stuff...how many copies of the BBN report
> 1822 (on the host-IMP interface) do you think are floating around out
> there?

Actual paper copies? I do not know.
 
> I've found something else that sticks out in a crowd: I/O cards for the
> HP 2100-family machines.

Stick out because of the gold? Those boards sure are shiney. They probably
have several dollars worth of gold on the things, making them attractive
to the scrappers - maybe that is why I never run into any.

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Mon Oct 06 1997 - 06:51:19 BST