On April 5, 2010 at 13:51 smb@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. 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. 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. -b