-----Original Message----- From: Robert E.Seastrom [mailto:rs@seastrom.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2005 11:11 AM To: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine Cc: Hannigan, Martin; wsimpson@greendragon.com; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: netblazer Was: baiting

Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net> writes:

...

In this period of time, the White Knights built the InterOp shownets and we had comparative access to quite a lot of vendor product, and know that the red buttons on Wellfleets were correctly positioned on the front, for easy access. We used NetBlazers for dial-up outbound (we were topologically quite diverse by '91, our last show in the San Jose facility) and I don't recall anything ... resembling the behavior that I could characterize as POS like function.

My recollection of that show was "T-1 to BARRnet", not bonded-Netblazer-dialout, but I didn't "work the show" until the following spring, so my recollection could be at fault.

I wouldn't characterize Netblazers as being particularly cruddy compared to other options available at the time. Remember that this was the era of the Cisco ASM, the Encore/Xylogics Annex (Wellfleet hadn't changed their name to Bay yet, much less bought the Annex product line), some nasty 3com terminal server of which my memory has thankfully purged most details and the gone but not lamented Cisco TRouter. The Netblazers worked pretty darned well when plugged into Telebit modems. Third party modems, well, there were a lot of knobs you could twist, and not the best in the way of documentation on what to do with 'em.

Based on my experience with them, I'm quite sure they were fabulous devices capable of being configured in the field to do just about anything, if you had the level of familiarity with their internals that someone who worked QA for them would have had.

There really wasn't any good modem, IMHO, back then. They were all painful to configure and make work reliably. Once the "net" revolution started it still took years to get modems working reliably. In '98 I know that the Max TNT was only getting about 85% call completion across_the_board. Call completion only takes into account the completed handshake. Then you dealt with code issues after you got them to at least connect. -M<