[rescue] Trade?

[Dave McGuire]

On Friday, October 10, 2003, at 06:13 PM, Skeezics Boondoggle wrote:
>> One power cord per enclosure (it was 10 or 12 modems if I remember
>> correctly), one phone cord per modem.  (these was the pre-lines-on-PRI
>> days).  The only thing you saw in the front of the enclosure was the 
>> red
>> LEDs on the front edge of the Courier PCBs.
>
> Yeah, we chose the Microcoms at the time because they could do 16 
> modems
> per chassis, and we'd stack four of those and two Telebit Netblazers in
> each rack.  (The USR TCRs were *insanely* expensive at the time - way, 
> way
> more than we could afford, and the big Ascend boxes that took in 672 
> lines
> over a T3 didn't exist yet.)  The first row were some older DEC 4-rail
> racks, bolted together.  The rows behind that were taller, cheaper 
> relay
> racks, which held more modem chassis.[1]

   Those were the days.  We (Digex) used those DEC H960 racks too, with 
wooden shelves bolted in with angle brackets.  We used Lego blocks to 
space the modems apart to keep them
from overheating.

   When we finally got bigtime funding, we bought a bunch of those TCR 
boxes at nearly $30K apiece.  They were nice because their firmware was 
ComOS by Livingston, so all our existing stuff worked with them...our 
big banks of individual modems were connected to Livingston Portmaster 
PM2E-30 terminal servers which ran the "original" ComOS.

   Then when we started getting really big we bought Cisco AS5200s.  My 
GOD they were great.

              -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                      "My tummy hurts now, but my soul
St. Petersburg, FL                 feels a little better."     -Ed