news@helens.Stanford.EDU (news) (11/07/90)
Back in the late 70's and early 80's, the Physics department at Washington University (St. Louis) had a primitive (by today's standards) network of 8 to 10 diskless PDP-11's running a modified RT-11 hanging off of a dedicated PDP-11 disk server. Each client had it's own coax link to the server. (Good thing they had separate lines too, since nearly every thunderstorm blew the transceiver chips at both ends of the long line out to the cyclotron building.) Around 1980, with the proliferation of micros like the Apple II and S-100 CPM boxes, the architect of the system, Prof. Scandrett, extended the network so that micros could all share the same cable. He had it working on the Apple II's. In 1981, I hacked up CPM's BIOS to make the disk server look like a (rather large) CPM drive. Disk storage (other than floppies) was quite expensive at the time, so I'm sure there were similar ad-hoc networks elsewhere. Everyone knows about ethernet, which was by then, I believe, common at most large universities. But what about networks that became extinct, the network dinosaurs? What was happening with other mini/microcomputer networks around that time? Jim Helman Department of Applied Physics Durand 012 Stanford University FAX: (415) 725-3377 (jim@KAOS.stanford.edu) Work: (415) 723-9127
gdmr@cs.edinburgh.ac.uk (George Ross) (11/08/90)
In article <JIM.90Nov6131135@baroque.Stanford.EDU>, news@helens.Stanford.EDU (news) writes: > ... But what about networks that became extinct, the > network dinosaurs? What was happening with other mini/microcomputer > networks around that time? They're still alive and kicking (at least, in their later incarnations). In the early '70s we had an assortment of minis, tied together with point-to-point "links", running initially at about 256Kbaud, and latterly at 2Mbaud. These links were full-duplex flow-controlled, with error detection (parity and positive/negative acknowledgement). The machines included several Interdata 70s, a dozen or so 74s, a PDP-8, a PDP-9 and a PDP-15. Originally they all ran their usual operating systems, but around 1976 we added a big (67Mbyte!) disc to one of the 70s and converted it to a file server. At first it just did file storage and transfer, but by the early 1980s we had converted the 74s to be discless clients which booted from the central server (thanks to the AUTOLOAD instruction) and then relied completely on it and a separate compute server (another 70). Meantime the PDP-8 had been retired and the 9 and 15 converted to use the central server as a virtual-DECtape server as well as a file server. Since then we've converted the links to a 2Mbaud CSMA/CD network which provides reliable virtual circuits in the firmware, added 60-odd 68K-based machines, retired all the Interdatas and the PDP-9 and 15, and added several new 68K-based file servers. There's nothing left now of the original hardware, though for a while around the mid '80s it was all running happily together. In fact, the last "link" board was removed just last year when we switched off our 780. The file access protocol is still the same, though, more or less, as that used in 1976 -- the only difference is that the current servers don't understand some of the more baroque block-size constructs needed to get the virtual DECtapes working sensibly. It's a stateful protocol, btw, with user validation done by the servers on the basis of link- and VC-specific tokens issued by them in response to the initial logon request. Just what's needed, in fact, to deal with a labful of students all doing operating systems practicals. > > Jim Helman > Department of Applied Physics Durand 012 > Stanford University FAX: (415) 725-3377 > (jim@KAOS.stanford.edu) Work: (415) 723-9127 -- George D M Ross, Department of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh 031-650 5147 or 031-667 1081 gdmr@uk.ac.ed.cs (or cs.ed.ac.uk if you prefer)
etrmg@levels.sait.edu.au (11/10/90)
> But what about networks that became extinct, the > network dinosaurs? What was happening with other mini/microcomputer > networks around that time? > When I came to Australia, Two years ago, I had to deal with a Corvus Omninet They wouldn't believe me when I told them they needed a new network. It ran a bunch apple II's. Yuk, but It could connect up to IBM PC's and other computers as well. I understand (now) it was a type of RS422 hdwe layer. Anyways. I wouldn't mind having it at home tho. :-) Ronn
farber@grad2.cis.upenn.edu (David Farber) (11/10/90)
In 1973 ish at UC Irvine, we ran a fully distributed operating system with message passing IPC over a 2.3 megabit per second local token ring. The systems were 11 style (Locheed SUES) and the ring evolved to the Proteon and IBM rings latter on.
zane@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Sameer Parekh) (11/13/90)
In article <15662.273ad3d6@levels.sait.edu.au> etrmg@levels.sait.edu.au writes: > > >> But what about networks that became extinct, the >> network dinosaurs? What was happening with other mini/microcomputer >> networks around that time? >> > > >When I came to Australia, Two years ago, I had to deal with a Corvus Omninet >They wouldn't believe me when I told them they needed a new network. > >It ran a bunch apple II's. Yuk, but It could connect up to IBM PC's and >other computers as well. I understand (now) it was a type of RS422 hdwe >layer. Anyways. I wouldn't mind having it at home tho. :-) > >Ronn They are running that at my school now. A High School. (Of course this is a school in the Midwest. . .) (Ducking head to avoid flames) -- zane@ddsw1.MCS.COM
jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) (11/13/90)
I remember people having Corvus disk systems on their Apple II's around 1980. But I never used them. What was the architecture? Was the protocol file level or raw device? Jim Helman Department of Applied Physics Durand 012 Stanford University FAX: (415) 725-3377 (jim@KAOS.stanford.edu) Work: (415) 723-9127
milton@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Milton D Miller) (11/14/90)
In article <JIM.90Nov12221608@baroque.Stanford.EDU> jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) writes: > >I remember people having Corvus disk systems on their Apple II's >around 1980. But I never used them. What was the architecture? >Was the protocol file level or raw device? > Well, let's see what I can rember. We had one of these installed in high school, and I was a consultant* there too, only I worked more on the prime, but that is a different story. All of this is from memory of a user, so someone can correct my errors :-) The last time I went back and visited they had replaced it with a NOVELL (sp?) and had some macs and a couple IBM's too. The lab was installed in 1982; I graduated in 1986. * Consultant to other students, aka lab assistant during one class hour. My supervisor was the system administrator for the instructional computing facilities at the highschool. What I rember was 3 stackable boxes about 9x15" of various heights, one was the network interface (2-3" high), one was the VCR backup attachment (one board in a 1" case), and the disk itself (actually two drives, 40MB???? each?, 5-6" high). I rember the apple in the office was special, but I don't rember if it was in the datapath to the drive or not (probably not, as you could run regular applications there too). The lab consisted of 30 apple ][e's connected via 2 wires to a common bus line. Connections to the bus were made with T boxes and a 2 pin 1/8" phone plug. Each apple had a board in slot six (so you could boot from it), if you used ctl-reset you could abort the network boot. There was user login (with password) and you were given one or more pseudo-floppy disk volumes which booted a slightly different apple dos. Actually, you had drives one and two on slot six and volumes 1-255, so you play games. Each apple also had a local floppy drive installed in slot four for user access and program storage. There was also support for apple pascal, you could boot and run it off the network, including accessing multiple volumes (this is where I took my first stab at pascal....) It took some time to get reliable VCR backups, which took about 45 min to record and another 45 to verify (we found that the early ones with random VCRs were not doing any good, and bought a VCR for our sole use). Probably the thing I rember most is patching basic software to support the multiple volumes so the program and data would be on the shared read-only disk, but the data would be written on the disk in drive 4). The other thing I rember doing is going around and booting some wordprocessor at every station from two floppies :-) (yes, we were licsensed for multiple copies). Well, this is what I rember from a user's perspective. If you have specific questions, I try and rember, but no promises. milton
hsu@eng.umd.edu (Dagwood splits the Atom) (11/15/90)
In article <1990Nov13.210141.28709@en.ecn.purdue.edu> milton@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Milton D Miller) writes: >In article <JIM.90Nov12221608@baroque.Stanford.EDU> jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) writes: >>I remember people having Corvus disk systems on their Apple II's >>around 1980. >Well, let's see what I can rember. We had one of these installed in >high school... The lab was installed in 1982; I graduated in 1986. ... >What I rember was 3 stackable boxes about 9x15" of various heights, >one was the network interface (2-3" high), one was the VCR backup >attachment (one board in a 1" case), and the disk itself Sounds like a Corvus Constellation setup with the Corvus Mirror VCR backup device. Who says videotape data storage is a new idea :-) Someone actually bought a Mirror? Wow. -dave -- David Hsu Engineering Computer Facility (301) 405 3689 hsu@eng.umd.edu The Maryversity of Uniland, College Park, MD 20742 SAM: "Uh, thanks." TUTTLE: "Listen, kid, we're all in it together."
6600raft@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Michael Wise) (11/15/90)
In article <1990Nov14.175037.1497@eng.umd.edu> hsu@eng.umd.edu (Dagwood splits the Atom) writes: >In article <1990Nov13.210141.28709@en.ecn.purdue.edu> milton@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Milton D Miller) writes: >>In article <JIM.90Nov12221608@baroque.Stanford.EDU> jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) writes: >>>I remember people having Corvus disk systems on their Apple II's >>>around 1980. >>Well, let's see what I can rember. We had one of these installed in >>high school... The lab was installed in 1982; I graduated in 1986. I remember using a Corvus Constellation setup in H.S. too. I remember the servers came in 5, 10 and 20 meg versions (correct me if I'm wrong), and that was pretty impressive when at the time an Apple ][ floppy only held about 140K. Remember how when you booted up the Apple the constellation would appear on the screen in ascii "*"s... -- ========================================================================= | Internet: 6600raft@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu | All opinions stated are mine.| | BITNET: 6600raft@UCSBUXA.BITNET | **Save The Earth** | =========================================================================
lyle@hpindda.cup.hp.com (Lyle Weiman) (11/15/90)
What, and nobody mentioned Z-Net yet? It was a completely proprietary network, implemented on Zilog's z80-based os (forgot its name), which was implemented in assembly and so pretty non-portable, but there were some folks who liked it. Z-net ran at about 800kbps, using an SIO chip, the same one that Omninet used for its 1mbps, I think.
) (11/15/90)
In article <1990Nov14.175037.1497@eng.umd.edu>, hsu@eng.umd.edu (Dagwood splits the Atom) writes: > In article <1990Nov13.210141.28709@en.ecn.purdue.edu> milton@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Milton D Miller) writes: >>In article <JIM.90Nov12221608@baroque.Stanford.EDU> jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) writes: >>>I remember people having Corvus disk systems on their Apple II's >>>around 1980. >>Well, let's see what I can rember. We had one of these installed in >>high school... The lab was installed in 1982; I graduated in 1986. > ... >>What I rember was 3 stackable boxes about 9x15" of various heights, >>one was the network interface (2-3" high), one was the VCR backup >>attachment (one board in a 1" case), and the disk itself > > Sounds like a Corvus Constellation setup with the Corvus Mirror VCR backup > device. Who says videotape data storage is a new idea :-) > > Someone actually bought a Mirror? Wow. > Well, like I said, the Ozzie company here (my previous employer BTW :-) ) had the Omninet. . . They had one 10M server and a mirror, which was not utilized; It was just 'around'. Anyways - - You could run Different net OS'es on it. Since it was basically RS-422, I guess the specs were pretty easy to find. Our problem was that we had the Constellation II software, an upgrade I assume from the C I product. It used pipes to send files & things between apples & IBM's, etc. . . I have seen a card since for an NEC APC (!?) Talk about a beast. . . Well, that was basically our problem; because Novell had a package of Netware to run on the Omninet. Unfortunately, we had the CII software from Corvus, which had just gone under. I couldn't find anything to help me use the system and the rest of the site (Winery) was going headlong into Appletalk and since Mac IIcx's, I got frustrated and left. How can you do control on a shoestring like that? It would have been nice to do Arcnet. I understand that's a good deterministic system. Would have been just right for controlling gear remotely, although there was another net (by Proteon?) called 10-net ??? I was impressed by that. What has happened to it? I could seal off sections of the net and if connections where completely broken, you'd have two separately operating systems Sounded great, but was $$$. . . Ronn
cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan) (11/15/90)
In article <15686.27426844@levels.sait.edu.au>, etrmg@levels.sait.edu.au (What a Guy!) writes: >there was another net (by Proteon?) called 10-net ??? I was impressed by that. >What has happened to it? I could seal off sections of the net and if >connections where completely broken, you'd have two separately operating systems >Sounded great, but was $$$. . . Proteon 10-Net is an 802.5-style token ring, essentially like IBM Token Ring but at 10 Mbits/sec rather than 4 or 16. -- cowan@marob.masa.com (aka ...!hombre!marob!cowan) e'osai ko sarji la lojban
erick@sunee.waterloo.edu (Erick Engelke) (11/17/90)
In article <2742B8F0.6ED4@marob.masa.com> cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan) writes: etrmg@levels.sait.edu.au (What a Guy!) writes: >>there was another net (by Proteon?) called 10-net ??? I was impressed by that. >>What has happened to it? I could seal off sections of the net and if >>connections where completely broken, you'd have two separately operating systems >>Sounded great, but was $$$. . . > >Proteon 10-Net is an 802.5-style token ring, essentially like IBM Token Ring >but at 10 Mbits/sec rather than 4 or 16. >-- Proteon proNET 10 is still a popular networking product. It's simple to program, has low overhead, and performs faster than 16Mbit IBM Token Ring due to the low amount of overhead. Banyan Vines, Novell and a bunch of other network operating systems all support it. So do quite a few large university networks Watstar (ours is 450 nodes), TCP/IP stuff at Purdue and MIT, and the Free University of Holland (Taunenbaum's home). ProNET 10 is cheaper than IBM Token Ring, and pretty similar to good Ethernet cards. Erick Engelke Systems Manager University of Waterloo
i1neal@exnet.iastate.edu (Neal Rauhauser -- ELT Computer Applications Group) (11/18/90)
In article <7228@hub.ucsb.edu> 6600raft@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Michael Wise) writes: >In article <1990Nov14.175037.1497@eng.umd.edu> hsu@eng.umd.edu (Dagwood splits the Atom) writes: > >>In article <1990Nov13.210141.28709@en.ecn.purdue.edu> milton@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Milton D Miller) writes: >>>In article <JIM.90Nov12221608@baroque.Stanford.EDU> jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) writes: >>>>I remember people having Corvus disk systems on their Apple II's >>>>around 1980. >>>Well, let's see what I can rember. We had one of these installed in >>>high school... The lab was installed in 1982; I graduated in 1986. > >I remember using a Corvus Constellation setup in H.S. too. I remember >the servers came in 5, 10 and 20 meg versions (correct me if I'm wrong), My office mate is a Corvus mechanic on the side - the latest version of the roms for those things support 330 meg mfm drives(!) and the largest hes ever used was a 110 meg disk
cos@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Ofer Inbar) (11/21/90)
In article <7228@hub.ucsb.edu> 6600raft@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Michael Wise) writes: >I remember using a Corvus Constellation setup in H.S. too. I remember >the servers came in 5, 10 and 20 meg versions (correct me if I'm wrong), >and that was pretty impressive when at the time an Apple ][ floppy >only held about 140K. > >Remember how when you booted up the Apple the constellation would appear >on the screen in ascii "*"s... We had an Apple ][ lab with a Corvus in elementary school; it was installed when I was in sixth grade (1981). The one thing I best remember about it was how often it crashed, and how often we lost all of our files. I really hated the thing, I almost expected to lose my files every time I went into the lab. The year I graduated from 8th grade they got a second Corvus (ack!). I used to use the Apple monitor program to write short machine language programs, and would save them on the Corvus using BSAVE. The computer teacher/sysadmin used to blame me for bringing down the Corvus by writing binary files to it. -- Cos (Ofer Inbar) -- cos@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu -- WBRS (BRiS) -- WBRS@binah.cc.brandeis.edu WBRS@brandeis.bitnet
lynch@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Richard Lynch) (11/22/90)
In article <1990Nov20.201509.14205@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu> cos@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Ofer Inbar) writes: > We had an Apple ][ lab with a Corvus in elementary school; it was > installed when I was in sixth grade (1981). The one thing I best > remember about it was how often it crashed, and how often we lost all > of our files. I really hated the thing, I almost expected to lose my > files every time I went into the lab. The year I graduated from 8th > grade they got a second Corvus (ack!). > > I used to use the Apple monitor program to write short machine > language programs, and would save them on the Corvus using BSAVE. The > computer teacher/sysadmin used to blame me for bringing down the > Corvus by writing binary files to it. And he/she/it was absolutely RIGHT!!! You ex- little s*&%. :-) The BSAVE command takes several optional arguements. There are two numbers to include at the end that specified volume and directory on a system such as the Corvus. If you left them off, you ended up saving your machine language right on top of the directory structure on the corvus. I saw students do this when I was student teaching. If only there had been a manual around, I could have told them what to type in or at least have told them it wouldn't work and why. As it was, they were using some program that would calculate the numbers automatically and it worked great for the standard (disk in slot 6?) setup, but didn't append the extra numbers for the Corvus. "TANSTAAFL" Rich lynch@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu
tytso@tsx-11.MIT.EDU (Theodore Y. Ts'o) (11/26/90)
In article <20@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu> lynch@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Richard Lynch) writes: >In article <1990Nov20.201509.14205@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu> >cos@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Ofer Inbar) writes: >> We had an Apple ][ lab with a Corvus in elementary school; it was >> installed when I was in sixth grade (1981). The one thing I best >> remember about it was how often it crashed, and how often we lost all >> of our files. I really hated the thing, I almost expected to lose my >> files every time I went into the lab. The year I graduated from 8th >> grade they got a second Corvus (ack!). >> The other neat thing about the Corvus was that the "Login program" would read the login/password file into memory and leave it there after it logged you in. Of course, the passwords were stored in the clear, so it was the work of a moment to write a quick basic program to dump out all of the accounts with their passwords. Security? What's that? =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Theodore Ts'o bloom-beacon!mit-athena!tytso 3 Ames St., Cambridge, MA 02139 tytso@athena.mit.edu Everybody's playing the game, but nobody's rules are the same!