lindahl@waltz.UUCP (12/22/84)
While at DECUS in Anaheim, my boss ran across TRANSlan, a "transparent ETHERNET bridge", made by VITALINK (based in Mt View CA). Here are some of the particulars: 1) The box, based on BRIDGE communications CS/1 (which contains 3 68000s) was jointly developed by DEC and VITALINK. Discussions are underway between the two companies to try to work out DEC support for the boxes. 2) Although VITALINK's business is satellite communications, the box DOES NOT require satellite to work; you can use a 9.6 Kb line between boxes if you wish (although that is not recommended). 3) The box attaches to the ETHERNET as a "transparent" node (i.e., it is never explicitly addressed). It has a "learn" mode, in which it figures out which addresses are "local" to the ETHERNET (this is done by monitoring packets & seeing responses to specific destination addresses on the local net). 4) The beauty of all of this is that it ONLY uses the lower 3 layers of ISO; hence it doesn't care WHAT the upper level protocols are (DECnet, TCP/IP, XNS, CHAOSNET, etc). We haven't installed any boxes yet, but intend to give them a try next month. I would be interested in talking to other users ; is there anybody else considering these?