Starlan was pretty big in its' day. When I worked at IRD/Westinghouse in
1988 I walked into a Novell network that was running 2.01 on a Starlan
network. If I recall there were 8 port hubs that were chained together
in a daisy chain configuration: I think those were bell labs hubs.
Anyway the PC's all had 8 bit ISA cards as well as the 286 server. It
was good, relatively reliable, and ran on the existing twisted pair
phone lines wired against 66 pin punchblocks and USOC wiring format.
We bought a Synoptics LattisNet 10 later on and put a NP600 card in the
server to route the traffic. The NP600 was sweet: It had an 80186
processor on board and could run a good chunk of the IPX stack on card
so it didn't burden the CPU. Coupling that with a Novell smart disk
adapter (which could do hardware mirroring and hot fix) and the CPU was
surprisingly quiet on the server.
Ah those were the days. It was after that job I got introduced to Arcnet....
On 8/20/2020 1:50 AM, Mike Begley via cctalk wrote:
Wow. I ran StarLan 1 around my apartment in college, using an AT&T 3b1 as the
hub and a collection of 8088 PCs with 8-bit ISA cards scattered around. I could
rlogin (not telnet, from my recollection) from any of the PCs to the 3B1, and dial
out through a 14.4 modem into the university network. Only one at a time, mind
you, I never got SL/IP or PPP running, but still, it was like living into the
future. A network...in my own house!
To my recollection, StarLan was entirely an AT&T product, and few if any other
vendors supported it.
I MAY still have the StarLan board for the 3B1 around (along with most of the
3B1 disassembled in parts). But all the PC cards, the hub and documentation
are long gone. I believe I sold them to someone in Yellowknife, but this would
have been well over a quarter century ago.
You might be able to find some additional info in the archives in the
comp.sys.3b1 usenet group. Shockingly, I just noted that has actually been a
smattering of on-topic (not spam) chatter there in the last few years, even as
recently as April, so there's a handul of users still out there with these
machines in hand.
Good luck,
-mike
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk <cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Steven M Jones via
cctalk
Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2020 7:55 PM
To: cctalk@classiccmp.org
Subject: Network gear that supported StarLAN 1 (not 10)
I was wondering if anybody remembers which networking vendors supported StarLAN
1, or 802.3e / 1Base5, back in the 1980s? Hoping to get product names and/or
model numbers.
I've come across some references to Western Digital, Micom-Interlan, Cross Comm
Corp (Massachusetts), and Fox Research (later DCA?) possibly having offered
products to bridge StarLAN to Ethernet. But in the few cases where I've seen a
model (ex. Cross Comm 487 Series) I haven't been able to get past blurbs in
Info World.
I have one host interface, expect more to arrive shortly, and would love to
track down a bridge/switch/router that might allow me to make them reachable
from Ethernet.
Thanks,
--Steve.
