Vintage networking & magnetic media
Posted by CookiesTheKitty@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 28 comments
This sub seems to have a lot of attention given to computers themselves - and understandably so - but there were other technologies involved in the delivery of IT back in the day. Being an avid & out-of-control hoarder I have a lot of such things in my home. Examples shown in these photos are a Cisco 2651XM router, a chonky Cisco 4507R switch, a stack of various styles of used & unused punch cards, an open-reel tape and some tape cartridges.
Not shown are a heap of other switches, routers, historical interface types & associated networking equipment such as VoIP phone handsets; other magnetic tape formats such as DAT, Exabyte, DLT and early Ultrium cartridges; a ton of manuals & other books. While many of these things are consigned to the history books, some of these technologies are still in use (or can be put to use).
These are part of our shared IT heritage. There are active and vibrant online hobbyists with a passion for IBM mainframes, Multics, VAX and PDP-11, and much more. Many of these can be competently emulated on modern hardware such as the Raspberry Pi with applications such as simh, hercules and dps8m, each of which can be built on host OS like Debian.
Imagine an entire computer room with an IBM S/370 mainframe, tapes, card readers, punches and printers, all smcondensed down onto a micro-SD card in a Raspberry Pi Zero
So, I'm posting this to test the waters and to see if there are others in this sub with past experience of these things and/or an appetite to tumble down this series of rabbit holes with me...
mschnittman@reddit
I remember watching Control Data advertisements on TV when I was a kid.
RCHeliguyNE@reddit
Vintage Ethernet would involve a vampire tap !
SaturnFive@reddit
I still want to setup token ring on a vampire tapped coax cable 😆
orion3311@reddit
Do it! Be the person you wanted to be...31 years ago.
CookiesTheKitty@reddit (OP)
I may have some of that generation of networking gadgetry hidden away somewhere in a cupboard here. I know that I have a load of T-pieces, terminators and - I think - cheapernet cables / yellow string "somewhere". As for thick ethernet, that would have to be a maybe. Still, happy days though...
orion3311@reddit
Praying I didn't go Schizophrenic and this is the other me.
holysirsalad@reddit
Catalyst 4500s are getting old but still in use all over lol. One of the companies we work with runs them as Active Ethernet FTTx boxes with Supervisor 8Es and the 40x CSFP line cards.
Used to run a pile of 2600s as T1 CE routers back when that was a thing. Fun times!
Got any readers for the old media?
DeepDayze@reddit
Those things were HEAVY too. Racking and unracking them usually required 2-3 people.
holysirsalad@reddit
Sure, if you leave the guts in ‘em ;)
DeepDayze@reddit
True. When I worked a project to decommission a data center that was being closed there were several of those old Cisco Catalyst switches that needed removing and some were mounted high off the floor so had the idea to slide out the components from the unit to lighten it to make it easier to remove. Was quite a job!
CookiesTheKitty@reddit (OP)
I use that 2651XM primarily for OOB/reverse telnet. It's a quick way to get console access to multiple devices via one phat async cable and some initial config.
I have old Sun Exabyte tape drives, external DLT7000, external DAT and, possibly, external QIC drives. My Sun servers, wonderful though they are, are buried in piles of kit in my garage & haven't been powered up for over a decade. e250s, V240s, V240, a T1000 and some other ad-hoc things.
I don't have any non-Sun desktops with a SCSI interface, be that traditional, fast/wide, differential or anything else. One of the downsides of becoming an online person and someone that occasionally interacts with the 21st century (only when I must, of course), machines with card slots or even PCMCIA slots are hard to come by, and contemporary USB-to-SCSI interfaces are £expensive£. It's on my to-do list to equip myself with the requisite interfaces somehow, as I'd like to buy an external Ultrium/LTO/whatever drive for reasons, but for the moment, nope.
holysirsalad@reddit
Niiice. We have a couple 2821s at work still filling the same role as your 2651
DeepDayze@reddit
9 track tape...good times!
Noodler75@reddit
It was nice when the auto-threading drives came out. They worked most of the time.
CookiesTheKitty@reddit (OP)
Indeed; the vacuum tape loading mechanism was a pretty innovative idea. https://youtu.be/7Lh4CMz_Z6M?si=7jFwPmsGZdWl-zN1 is worth a watch sometime.
Noodler75@reddit
I used to spend a lot of time in one of those rooms filled by a S/370 with the tape drives, the reader/punch, the massive 3330 disk array, and the printer. Somehow a Raspberry Pi does not capture the experience of changing the ink ribbon on an IBM 1403-N1 printer. Remember to put on the supplied plastic gloves before touching anything, and do not wear a tie!
And I was not even one of the regular operators; I was what was called a "system programmer", which meant I installed software upgrades. The whole room would be turned over to me and the regular operators took a break.
DeepDayze@reddit
Ohh yes I remember floor suckers...used that gadget a lot to remove tiles for accessing/running cabling under the floor.
Noodler75@reddit
We were warned not to mess around too much under there as stirring up dust would trigger the primitive underfloor smoke detectors and if two detectors were triggered the fire suppression system (Halon in those days) would go off.
CookiesTheKitty@reddit (OP)
Mainframe-wise, I was in Team ICL rather than Team IBM, but that would have much the same kind of workflow, just using VME toolsets.
If you're referring to floor tile lifters, in the site that had the ICL mainframe the square tiles were carpeted and so the tile lifters had loads of fierce & brutal spikes that would go down & outward at maybe a 45⁰ angle to give them enough purchase. In my current workplace our datacentre tile faces are smooth & not carpeted, so we use suction cup ended tile pullers for those.
TygerTung@reddit
Back in the '90s at primary school, we did these multi choice tests for something and had to draw really dark marks on the tests do they could be read by some kind of computer.
LynchDaddy78@reddit
When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, my dad used to bring home those "punch cards" while working at IBM. I didn't understand how they worked. Later, I joined the US Navy and told him about the paper tape reader that we were schooled on and that it was still on board US ships. The big tape reel we used for data recording on the USS Huè City CG-66. It's amazing how far we've come in my 65 years. Cheers 🥃
Imaginary-Scale9514@reddit
...vintage networking?
Oh man, so much of this stuff is still in production though. You're making me feel old lol
CookiesTheKitty@reddit (OP)
I think it's part of what makes these things so interesting is that decades-old access tier and even aggregate devices are still happily humming along, albeit at 100Mbps. I consider them vintage regardless of the fact they're still in use, basing it on when they hit the market & when they went EOL. I can understand why so many of them are still out in the field because (a) they tend to just keep working provided nothing changes in their environment & there's no power outage, and (b) migrating to other gear can be a planning nightmare when you're chasing 24/7/365 uptimes.
Of course, when the power outage does eventually happen, that's when you discover your flash went bad a decade ago...
countrypride@reddit
Who else sees that cisco gear and realizes they're now in the "fuck, I'm getting old" boat?
CookiesTheKitty@reddit (OP)
Not me. I'm in the "fuck, I've got old" boat.
countrypride@reddit
Okay, better choice of words!
W0CBF@reddit
The good old days!
CookiesTheKitty@reddit (OP)
For some reason my Cisco 2651XM router didn't post, but you can read about that series HERE.