What's your specialty?

From: William Donzelli <aw288_at_osfn.org>
Date: Tue Feb 5 22:47:10 2002

> Elaborate? Weirder than usual?

It is a semicustom RS/6000 called a T3B. It is a Powerserver 930 with
a huge card cage, generally stuffed with Microchannel routing cards for
HSSI, FDDI, V.35, and Ethernet. It was made for the NSFnet backbone back
in 1990. My machine was the Chicago node. I think only twenty or so
machines were made.

The huge card cage was made to handle the "Hawthorne cards" - prototypes
of the RS960 routing cards. These "Hawthorne cards" are full length, but
stick up about a foot. These were used in the very early 1990s, being
replaced by the production-prototype versions, the RS960s. These RS960,
on the other hard, were used until 1996 or so - into the early days of
AOL (AOL even had one of these machines for the network).

RS960s are interesting - they are Intel i960 based Microchannel routers
with additional big IBM chips for routing engines. The RS/6000 that hosts
them is more or less just there for the ride. They are very rare cards -
every one I dealt with has a three digit (or less) serial number.
Eventually IBM turned the V.35 and Ethernet RS960s into real products,
but they failed to sell well. They were a design dead-end - the
routing engines have a very limitted (by today's standard) routing
table, and for some reason it could not be expanded easily. Cisco helped
kill them, as well.

Once in a Blue Moon, you might come across an RS/6000 with a strange tag
(6611 Network Processor, I think). They are basically Powerserver 220 and
320 machines, but with the V.35 and Ethernet cards. Sometimes these cards
are still installed. Grab them at all costs. I have found them in these
before, at hamfests and junkyards. Nearly all of the early RS960s went back
to IBM, or were scrapped.

I have heard there is a token ring RS960, but I can not confirm this.

William Donzelli
aw288_at_osfn.org
Received on Tue Feb 05 2002 - 22:47:10 GMT