Could you please publish the: EE-EA345-42-001 The Digital/3Com Guide to IBM document # GG22-9422-0" DEC document ?
Thanks Ulli Paul Koning via cctalk <[email protected]> schrieb am Do., 16. Okt. 2025, 16:12: > > > > On Oct 15, 2025, at 7:14 PM, Doug Jackson via cctalk < > [email protected]> wrote: > > > > Ethernet also got *way* more market traction, because it was > > infinitely more survivable. > > > > One of my early jobs was managing a Token Ring network, and we spent our > > days running around a 13 floor building, chasing machines where people > had > > kicked connectors out of walls, just enough to stop data, but not enough > to > > make the MAU do the self isolation. We had a piece of software called > the > > Cabletron TR Manager - that monitored the ring for beaconing, and let us > > know the upstream node that detected the break. Then we would consult > our > > *detailed* notes on what cards were installed where, so we could find the > > culprit that was broken. Without the notes, we would have had zero > chance. > > FDDI was somewhat better. It's not all that well known, but IBM (802.5) > token ring and FDDI have essentially nothing in common. At DEC when we > were working on its development we liked to say that the only things in > common are "token" and "ring". Actually, FDDI is in a sense an evolution > of 802.4, of all things. > > I also remember while there kicking around the notion that we could take > the FDDI signaling scheme (4b/5b code) and use it to send Ethernet > packets. That worked quite well and the rest is history... > > > > > Heady days. > > > > I suggested to the network manager at the time that we could transition > > from TR to Ethernet (everything was wired with Cat3 Shielded cable - but > he > > didn't want to, because "Ethernet had collisions" - that was when I > > discovered that everybody has limitations that something breaks their > > thinking. After a while I convinced him to transition one of the > Cabletron > > cards to Ethernet, and do a test on a 32 workstation card - Suffice to > say > > that those 32 machines never had an issue, and eventually, all 800 > machines > > across two rings were transitioned to 100Mb Ethernet. > > Around that time, IBM put out a marketing document that pretended to show > why token ring was better than Ethernet. The DECnet architecture group > (where I worked at the time) created a paragraph by paragraph rebuttal to > that and published it as a joint DEC/3Com document. I still have it: "The > Digital/3Com Guide to IBM document # GG22-9422-0" (DEC document > EE-EA345-42-001). It doesn't seem to be online, Google has never heard of > it, nor the IBM document it rebuts. As I recall, Bill Hawe was the lead > author of that work; I wrote some bits and pieces for it but I don't > remember the details. > > paul
