|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
65.19.76.104
In Reply to: RE: It is most definately a computer using low-profile 12volt Mini ITX motherboard and.... posted by rick_m on April 22, 2014 at 18:27:39
I'm not sure where I got the idea that computers would proliferate much like fractional horsepower motors. I do recall reading that the average (American) household had several dozen fractional horsepower electric motors, and a little thought at the time about my own situation confirmed that estimation.
I was in charge of computer networking at Digital Equipment at the time I first met Vint Cerf, and we had a network architecture that allowed for only 16 bit network addresses in theory and only about 8 bits in practice. (This was at a time where the DECnet software was being called "bloated" by some people in the company, despite the fact that it fit in 32 kB of memory.) We were being pushed by our customers, especially NASA, to expand this limit, but for various reasons never really solved the address problem because of company politics and a management directive that we were to collaborate with our European brethren who were hooked on "International Standards" under the auspices of bureaucratic organizations such as ISO. Anyhow, our concerns about network size had provoked my thinking on this subject.
I can take some credit for the 48 bit Ethernet addresses as I was one of about five people at the meeting between Digital, Intel and Xerox where the 32 bit addresses of the Xerox's 3 Mbps research Ethernet were expanded to 48 bits to permit decentralized administration. I was personally responsible for the 16 bit CRC being changed to 32 bits, and this only happened because I told the President of DEC that I would not have any part of standardizing an unreliable data communications system that could lead to dangerous data corruption. This was an interesting situation, whereby Ken Olsen told the head of Xerox that Digital would back out of the deal if they didn't agree to the 32 bit CRC. (The actual 32 bit code had been selected and its performance analyzed by two mathematicians at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base a few years earlier for a military communications network.) Some emails on this subject went between Xerox and Digital over the ARPAnet and these got intercepted and passed on to the press. I believe it was one of my emails that was the cause of the first public story in Electronic News Daily about collaboration in networking between Digital and Xerox. (Intel came later.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
It's fun to see where things go over time and to be involved in the early days as you were.
I was simply struck with how well the motor:computer (for lack of a better generic term) analogy actually works. It's one of those things that would never have occurred to me but now that you've mentioned it has been shifting from "what?" to "OK" and is approaching "that's obvious".
Small motors were huge to my Mom. One of her pride and joys circa 1950 was an electric clock. It even had a little red dot that magically would appear if it had lost power. And the phone Co. had a time of day thing that was accurate for setting them. Just knowing the time used to be really hard but we were rolling in new times and technologies. Each new appliance was a thing of wonder, begone accursed treadle sewing machine and icebox!
It's sort of odd how audiophiles have become lagging adaptors, that certainly didn't used to be the case. I was buckling up in our Toyota mobile computer this morning to go to the dentist and the radio display said that it had connected to my cell phone which is normal. THEN it said it had connected to my music device. My what? I guess I could sing into it's speakerphone... Or maybe my cheapest-thing-available cellphone can store music? Don't know, don't care. I just punched up KWAX and listened to classical music on the way.
But in reflection I suppose that sort of thing IS progress. A couple more generations of Flash and prolly my closet full of music WILL fit in my pocket and can be rendered by headphones, cars, home stereos and ice-chests...
We may need some new fora.
Rick
Interesting story Tony.
I'm no networking expert but Ethernet has come a long ways since the days of CSMA/CD and coax cable.
I also played a little with IBM 16 Mbit/s Token Ring back in the 1990s and helped a customer improve his performance by increasing his MTU.
We now support jumbo frames with improved CRC in modern Ethernet devices, thanks to Federal Government network requirements many years ago that forced vendors provide this capability.
Post a Followup:
FAQ |
Post a Message! |
Forgot Password? |
|
||||||||||||||
|
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: