Could you please publish the:
EE-EA345-42-001 The Digital/3Com Guide to IBM document # GG22-9422-0"
DEC document ?
Thanks
Ulli
Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> schrieb am Do., 16. Okt.
2025, 16:12:
On Oct 15, 2025, at 7:14 PM, Doug Jackson via
cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Ethernet also got *way* more market traction, because it was
infinitely more survivable.
One of my early jobs was managing a Token Ring network, and we spent our
days running around a 13 floor building, chasing machines where people
had
kicked connectors out of walls, just enough to
stop data, but not enough
to
make the MAU do the self isolation. We had a
piece of software called
the
Cabletron TR Manager - that monitored the ring
for beaconing, and let us
know the upstream node that detected the break. Then we would consult
our
*detailed* notes on what cards were installed
where, so we could find the
culprit that was broken. Without the notes, we would have had zero
chance.
FDDI was somewhat better. It's not all that well known, but IBM (802.5)
token ring and FDDI have essentially nothing in common. At DEC when we
were working on its development we liked to say that the only things in
common are "token" and "ring". Actually, FDDI is in a sense an
evolution
of 802.4, of all things.
I also remember while there kicking around the notion that we could take
the FDDI signaling scheme (4b/5b code) and use it to send Ethernet
packets. That worked quite well and the rest is history...
Heady days.
I suggested to the network manager at the time that we could transition
from TR to Ethernet (everything was wired with Cat3 Shielded cable - but
he
didn't want to, because "Ethernet had
collisions" - that was when I
discovered that everybody has limitations that something breaks their
thinking. After a while I convinced him to transition one of the
Cabletron
cards to Ethernet, and do a test on a 32
workstation card - Suffice to
say
that those 32 machines never had an issue, and
eventually, all 800
machines
across two rings were transitioned to 100Mb
Ethernet.
Around that time, IBM put out a marketing document that pretended to show
why token ring was better than Ethernet. The DECnet architecture group
(where I worked at the time) created a paragraph by paragraph rebuttal to
that and published it as a joint DEC/3Com document. I still have it: "The
Digital/3Com Guide to IBM document # GG22-9422-0" (DEC document
EE-EA345-42-001). It doesn't seem to be online, Google has never heard of
it, nor the IBM document it rebuts. As I recall, Bill Hawe was the lead
author of that work; I wrote some bits and pieces for it but I don't
remember the details.
paul