[Gllug] odd hardware

[rich at annexia.org]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 01:41:21PM +0000, John Hearns wrote:
> One other thing about ATM was the cost of the kit.
> I remember purchasing 155Mbps ATM switches and cards 
> in the days when fast Ethernet was unavailable.
> Now due to volume production, fast Ethernet cards can be had
> for about 12 UKP, and come built in to many systems.
> 
> ATM never had that volume pricing, so costs remained high.

Yes, and in fact I've still got some 155 Mbps ATM cards somewhere.
They originally cost UK 1500 each (IIRC), and eventually I got them
for free when the company I used to work for decided that ATM wasn't
happening. (Never used them of course: in another of those things
designed to fool the unwary, ATM and ethernet have different pinouts
for cross-over cables, even though the cables use exactly the same
technology).

Anyway the cards are 2 * Efficient Networks EN 155 PCI, and 1 *
another card who's name I forget. The "other" card is interesting
because it had a strange design without network buffers. Instead it
had excellent scatter-gather DMA capabilities and the idea was that
you would use the host's main memory instead of requiring any on-card
buffering. As I recall this was one of those theories that should have
remained a theory - the performance was dire.

Rich 'The hairs still stick up on the back of my neck when someone
mentions UNI and NNI' Jones

-- 
Richard Jones, Red Hat Inc. (London, UK) http://www.redhat.com/software/ccm
http://www.annexia.org/ Freshmeat projects: http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj

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