[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 63, Issue 3

[Karl Auerbach]

In the Interop show net during the late 1980s and into the 1990s we used 
routers from Cisco, Wellfleet, Proteon, and 3-Com.  It was fairly common 
for us to do several code updates a day because we tended to push the 
gear harder than the developers did.  And we found plenty of dissonances 
- such as different interpretations of what a directed broadcast meant 
to Ciscos and Wellfleets - we ended up with some 100% load infinite 
traffic loops because of that one.

We routed IP, Decnet, Netware/IPX, and ISO CLNP.  We did both unicast 
and multicast.

As for routing protocols I remember mostly OSPF in the unicast area and 
DVMRP and PIM in the multicast space.  External was always "unique" 
until BGP settled down.

We used underlying technologies ranging from yellow hose ethernet, IBM 
Token ring, to FDDI rings, T-1<and higher>, microwave, urban lasers, to 
even barbed wire.  During that era some people used DIX Ethernet and 
others used 802 SNAP - that was "fun".

We kinda pushed things, such as when we did a RAID array composed of USB 
thumb drives driven by iSCSI over wifi.

(Or show net typologies were far from simple hierarchies - we had plenty 
of path options, and our external was to at least two different providers.)

	--karl--


On 2/2/25 9:28 AM, John Shoch via Internet-history wrote:

> OK, so this has provoked me to ask a trivia question, especially for all of
> you who know more about Cisco than I do:
> "In the early days, how many networks or protocols were handled by Cisco's
> multi-protocol routers?"
> I certainly don't know.  But as a starting point, the Computer History