On Apr 5, 2010, at 4:58 59PM, Barry Shein wrote:
>
> On April 5, 2010 at 13:51 s...@cs.columbia.edu (Steven Bellovin) wrote:
>>
>> Yup. 10 years earlier, a 3Com Ethernet card for a Vax cost about $1500, if
>> memory serves.
>
> Early-mid 80s? I'd say at least twice that, I don't think there were
> too many cards for Vaxes and similar for less than $5K.
It could have been $3K, but I don't think it was higher.
>
> An NIU20 for DECSYSTEM-20 was a 3U box, it was just a single ethernet
> interface, and cost around $15-20K.
>
> About the same price for an IBM370 (specifically, 3090) ethernet box
> which included a PC/AT and sat on a box about the size of a dorm cube
> refrigerator which, if you opened it up, contained a chunk of Unibus
> backplane in which was a (I think 3COM?) ethernet board (and power
> supply etc.), some common Vax ethernet card. Weird, the whole thing
> was basically a kludged together Unibus to bus/tag channel adapter or
> maybe even 3274 using something like an IRMA board? I knew it well
> because it crashed a lot and operations decided I was the only one who
> had the magic voodoo to bring it back to life which as I remember was
> to POWER-CYCLE IT! Well, sometimes you had to power-cycle it more than
> once to get it all to synch.
I remember the design, but never used it.
>
> And we had to put coins in those boxes to get our packets through! If
> you wanted an email it cost a dime, FTP was 75cents for the first
> 100KB and 10c for each KB thereafter...ok, that may not be entirely
> accurate.
>
Of course not -- you forgot about the credit card reader option.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
