fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu (Erik E. Fair) (10/13/87)
Greg Chesson (designer of the UUCP "g" protocol and Version 7 UNIX's multiplexed files; now working for Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, CA) gave a paper at the Phoenix Summer USENIX Conference last June about a chip-set that he called a "protocol engine." The premise is that as networking hardware gets faster, you want to reduce your protocol implementations to silicon, to be able to use the bandwidth more effectively. His specific goal was to be able to keep up with a 100Mbit/sec FDDI network. Given that background, here is an item that appeared in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle, page C2: S I L I C O N G R A P H I C S S E L L S T E C H P R O J E C T Silicon Graphics Computer Systems Inc. of Mountain View said it has sold right to a year-old technology development project to Santa Barbara-based Protocol Engines Inc. The price was not disclosed. The so-called protocol engine technology includes a set of semiconductor chips that the company expects to help bring about much faster data communications networks. I'd appreciate it if someone at SGI (preferably Mr. Chesson himself) would comment on both the state of the project, and the reasons for the sale of the technology. Since I've never heard of Protocol Engines Inc. before, I surmise that this is actually a joint venture between SGI and some unknown number of other companies. Followups have been directed to comp.protocols.misc. submitted For Your Information, Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu