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

[Karl Auerbach]

The proponents of twisted pair ethernet claimed that the technology was 
so robust that one could run an ethernet span with the wire being barbed 
wire fencing.

So we set that up - pretty easy for us to splice a piece of to-base-t 
unshielded twisted pair to barbed wire.

It wasn't a long run of fencing - maybe eight to ten feet.

It worked.

(I can't remember whether we did that in conjunction with a jacobs 
ladder and other sources of RF noise.)

	--karl--

On 2/2/25 10:34 AM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow wrote:
> could internet history be a bit more embellished with a bit more 
> elucidation on/of the "/even barbed wire/" of the underlying 
> technologies reference pretty please🤔
> 
> On Sun, Feb 2, 2025 at 11:20 AM Karl Auerbach via Internet-history 
> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet- 
> history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
> 
>     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
>     -- 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com <mailto:Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com>
> living as The Truth is True
>