MOSS@cs.umass.EDU ("Eliot Moss, GRC A351B, x5-4206 21-May-1989 1431") (05/22/89)
Just a little bit of history that may interest a few folks ... Back in 1973 or so a PhD student named Dan Jackson at MIT developed a 7 Mbit (originally designed to be 10 Mbit, but some of the components available were not quite fast enough) ring net, having seen Farber's work. This was done in the EECS department's Digital Systems Lab under the supervision of Prof. Hoo-Min Toong. By sometime in 1975 the net was working reliably in the lab over twisted pair, sending data between homebrew Intel 8080 systems. This ring featured distributed control. Any node could become the "Ring Master", delivering timing from its quartz clock and handling any drift of the phase of the signal as it returned to the master. The current transmitter was termed the "Ring Lord" (I guess Dan like Tolkien). My connection was that I worked hourly supervising construction (wire wrap) and testing of the boards. My wife helped draw many of the schematics. My recollection is that this effort significantly predated the ring over in the Lab for Computer Science, which evolved into the Proteon product. Last I recall, Dan was working for Tektronix in Oregon. Does anyone out there recall any more of this effort? Was it ever published? (Remember, I was just an hourlyundergraduet employee...) Eliot Moss Asst Prof Dept of Comp and Info Sci Univ of Mass Amherst, MA 01003 Moss@cs.umass.edu