Xerox Alto Restoration – Ethernet pioneers/founders of 3Com visit [video] | Hacker News Reader

Xerox Alto Restoration – Ethernet pioneers/founders of 3Com visit [video]

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95 pointsbiofox35 comments

When Dave Boggs was digging around in the box of prototype Ethernet gear my heart skipped a little. I sure hope all of that gear ends up in a museum eventually. While my rational mind knows that there's nothing inherently special about the items in that box I'm not able to completely squelch the irrational part of my mind that's screaming "Holy artifacts!"

Well your irrationality got me to watch it. I hope you're happy ;)

I got a crazy feeling of irrational exuberance when I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I called a friend to tell him "I kid you not-- I am standing here looking at _the_ Utah Teapot." Getting a chance to see these early Ethernet devices would probably evoke similar oddly irrational (albeit pleasant) feelings.

Heh, I wonder how I'd react in front of this teapot, I was a CG head for many years. I'm not sure electronics would throw me off like that. Even though I got depressed for missing a Grid Laptop on an auction. I've exhausted that feeling since I think.

But, spirits of times, still does affect me. It's like an invisible book, I'm sure I'd love to walk between big IBM mainframes, and consoles.

I digress, I recently went to a flea market. And I took a time travelling slap in the face. I may be jaded by cult historical electronics, but seeing 18th furnitures, 19th tech of the day, magazines. It did something to me that is above the best VR today.

My biggest "miss" was not getting the winning bid for a VPL Dataglove on Ebay (I like to collect "vintage" VR artifacts).

That said, my greatest coup was finding an Altair 8800 at a local electronics salvage yard and only paying $100.00 for it.

Yeah - I went there last year with my wife and spent a long time wandering around. A few highlights for me:

Sitting in one of google's newer self-driving cars and checking out stuff.

Watching a demo of the Difference Engine #2 being cranked for a calculation (side note - there was a great angle to get a picture of it, and beyond it, a Cray Supercomputer).

...and the real highlight (for me) was getting to see the SRI Shakey robot up-close; all I had ever known before was pictures in books and magazines (and had only recently found some PDF scans of some of the original research papers on the project).

<indianajones> It belongs in a museum! </indianajones>

http://www.livingcomputers.org/

A friend of a friend sold his company and used some of the proceeds to collect various nerdy things. One of which was a successor to the original Arpanet IMPs.

I got to see it sitting on a pallet in a warehouse (with other cool stuff) in 2001 :)

I got to go to the Smithsonian museums as a kid in high school and my mom just shook her head when all I wanted to do was skip straight to the part with bits of ENIAC so I could take some pictures..

A fascinating moment around 11:55:

  - Did you ever find a program called EDP, Ethernet debugging program?
  - That's it [pointing at the screen].
  - [Looking at the screen] That's the new version. From '79.

... Looking at that early 50 ohm coax ethernet tap, it's amazing... Now we have $200 Intel 10GbE NICs with 1310nm LX SFP+ (the SFP costs $22) in some linux desktops and real world 9000+ Mbps speed tests bidirectional to an internal test server.

Or look at it another way, 1U rackmount 48-port line rate 10GbE SFP+ Arista switches from a few years ago are now available for $1000 from datacenter operators that have upgraded to QSFP/100GbE spine switches.

> SFP costs $22

Who and where are you buying SFP+ for $22? Most of them are above $200 for 10GbE.

Twinax DAC's cost about that much, assuming you don't need a long run. Hell, I bought two Mellanox Connect-X 2 cards + a twinax cable for my home (direct connection between my FreeNAS box and my TD340 running oVirt) for under $100.

$15 each for 2.5 meter

http://www.fs.com/c/10g-sfp-dac-1114

Cannot tell you in enough harsh language to avoid fs.com. I've had enough DOA and mis-flashed parts to swear them off forever. Really bad stuff. If you just want regular DAC, go straight to Mellanox (they have an online store) or Amphenol (cables on demand).

If you need to support a lot of vendors and not run up your costs in sparing, use something like the FlexOptix FlexBox.

But, seriously, avoid fs.com.

I've had luck buying off marketplace sellers on Amazon as well, but YMM (I've bought a pair of HP 4Gb FC cards for $40, the Mellanox NICS, DAC's, a dirt cheap LSI 9200-8e for $30, the list goes on - most of it's been new in box even).

We've been buying a shitload of patch cables, patch panels, pigtails, splicing supplies and other non electronic fiber stuff from them and have had no higher rate of defects than any other vendor. The optics are indeed suspiciously cheap.

Okay, $34, but that's before any quantity discount. For ordinary intra-building 1310nm LX links between equipment.

http://www.fs.com/products/11555.html

They're about $10-15 for genuine OEM gear on eBay.

I am tempted to say the world took a step backwards when it moved to thin coax with those BNC connectors and terminators.

And the less i say about fiddling with TP and modular connectors the better.

Being able to lay down a loop of coax, and then just clamp on as needed seems like heaven (though i guess having all those switches allows for much better throughput).

I much preferred the thin coax and BNC compared to thick. Maybe its because it was easier to educate helpers. The funny part was having a network of thin coax connected to 10baseT.

Now I have fibre and gigabit, so I never really got to that one solution again.

Heh. I tell my younger coworkers about vampire taps and they think I'm pulling their leg.

I remember being told during CCNA training, back in 2001ish, that there were basically 2 types of network engineer.

Those who had brought down an ethernet network whilst installing a vampire tap ...and those who were going to.

Insert joke here about network engineers scouring the floor for the lost token in a open-ended TokenRing network.

This is such a badass project. It touches so many things, and the process is going to teach us so much about our history.

There's been a handful of archaeology projects I've read about in the last few years that I thought of as beautiful, and this is one of them (a short list that includes a Baltimore hair stylist who decided to figure out how ancient Roman hairstyles actually worked [1])

1 - http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873249002045782862...

Funny how the tiny BeagleBone Black they're using to restore the Alto has more computing power in it than the Alto itself.

I have a Commodore Pet 8032 which is one of the most powerful pet machines. I found an ethernet adapter for it. I believe the microcontroller on the enthernet adapter has more computing power than the computer it connects it to. Still though it's cool as all heck.

In the Atari ST community there's a hard drive / floppy emulator and network interface called CosmosEx that uses a Raspbery Pi board internally. The Pi has _far_ more CPU horsepower than the 8mhz 68000 ST itself.

My first programming job was writing a real estate database system for that beast. With the twin-floppy expansion box. Built like a truck, and thankfully a much better keyboard than the PET.

And sadly the BBB will be much harder to restore than the Alto.

If only they can make an emulator out of it. So the rest of us can learn how to use it.

http://www.righto.com/2016/10/simulating-xerox-alto-with-con...

http://toastytech.com/guis/salto.html

kens recommends ContrAlto over Salto: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144534

A little boring to be honest:)

I recommend the YouTube channel jpkwiwigeek

I think you meant https://www.youtube.com/user/jpkiwigeek/

He doesn't appear to have an Alto though, which is popular here because the Alto in general was pretty prescient, and this particular Alto was given to YC by Alan Kay.

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