[LINK] [AusNOG] [ISOC-AU-mems] Happy Birthday ... AARNet

[Carl Makin]

On 26/03/2009, at 6:07 PM, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:

> I thought the debate was TokenRing vs Ethernet for the lowest level  
> of the OSI model.
>
> Netware/DECNET/TCP/IP etc were the next level up.

Yes that was the technical debate but was not how the trial was  
conducted.  They evaluated Pathworks over 10Mbit ethernet vs Netware  
over 16Mbit (I think) token ring and chose Pathworks.  We were using  
DECNET already since we had a large Vax/VMS environment at the time.   
This would have been around 1993.

DECNET was a little unusual in that it overrode the MAC address of the  
ethernet card with an address derived from the node number.  If you  
got it wrong on a PC on the network (and it happened a few times) then  
you could crash the vax cluster.


Carl.