These pages are no longer maintained, sorry, but some of the museum pieces are kept around ...
Some old information pages
From the museum ...
Finally, on network management, let's not forget how it used to be.
- A word had 24 bits and characters were coded in octal
- Modems needed two people to lift them but a pair from the same supplier, carefully set-up and using a tuned leased line
could get up to 14,400bps ... sometimes.
- The communications front-end processor booted from paper-tape.
- There was a hand-operated card punch under the desk for when the terminals stopped working ... and you knew most of the
card codes by heart.
- The ISO 7-layer model was implemented, not just referred to as an academic abstraction.
- ISO Transport Layer decodes merited a page in the diary: it was information needed at the
fingertips.
- 2400bps dial-up Bulletin boards, PADs, Triple-X, X.25 over analogue leased lines, teletypes, Baudot code, 1200/75
asymmetric modem connections, ...
- What diagnostic tools there were usually consisted of pieces of wire and a few LEDs.
- Not all these are gone yet but even where they survive their rôle is different from what it was, or might have
been.
www.ansdell.org.uk -> networks -> network management (netman.html)
Maintained by Martin Ansdell-Smith using GNU vi and RCS.
Last modified $Date: 2006/07/12 15:05:10 $.