David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > NSC being Network Systems Corporation. Acquired by Storagetek in the > 90s. Storagetek was acquired by Sun last year. > > NSC got killed by standards-based networking, essentially. Their > original products were doing cross-platform networking before there > were standards (or at least implementations) in place to do it, but > after awhile the real world came along and swept them away. > > I turned down the chance to work for them in HyperBus development > (proprietary competition with Ethernet, after Ethernet was well > established as a standard), did some contract work for them, and then > did end up working for them as they tried to become a router company.
i still have misc. nsc manuals (including hyperbus) somewhere in the basement. the nsc a720 adapters were specifically designed for a project my wife was running ... this was after she left pok, having done a stint as head of loosely-coupled architecture http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#shareddata which we later used as part of high-speed data transport project http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt hsdt eventually collected some number of nsc adapters. sometime later, we donated a number of them to the UT balcones supercomputing center. as mentioned previously, i had done the rfc1044 implementation for the standard mainframe tcp/ip product. the standard product would just about consume a 3090 processor getting 44kbytes/sec thruput. in some tuning done at cray research, we hit 1mbyte/sec sustain between cray and 4341-clone (4341 channel interface media speed) using only a modest amount of the 4341 processor. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044 he is a little modest about it ... my characterization is that one of the nsc people moved to the west coast and invented what was later to be called vpn for his own use for link back to nsc hdqtrs. he introduced it at gateway working group meeting at fall '94 san jose IETF meeting. in dec, after that meeting, one of the other router vendors announced product support for something that was supposedly similar which involved external hardware link encrypter boxes. i've commented frequently that both vpn and ssl came on the scene because ipsec involved updating all the (kernel) ip-protocol stacks for end-to-end encryption. both vpn and ssl left the underlying ip-protocol stacks untouched. my view at the time was this upset some number of the ipsec crowd ... and they eventually came to grips by referring to vpn as light-weight ipsec (and others starting to refer to ipsec as heavy-weight ipsec). past posting ref working with a small client/server startup company that wanted to do payment transactions on their server ... they had this technology called ssl ... that work is now sometimes referred to as e-commerce http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn2 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
