On 06/30/2016 04:49 PM, Neil Cherry via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Neat! I don't have a specific need for them, but there's a lot of interesting history behind this product. A direct descendant from the Stanford Blue Box, which of course also spawned Sun Microsystems. IIRC it's a Multibus box with very early Stanford-designed or 3Com Ethernet boards.
Cool, I knew some of this. I'd been trained with IOS 7.2 on the xGS line (and the AT&T Brouter, sounds like someone had gas ;-) ).
*BRRRAP!*
I almost got my hands on one of the early Cisco routers but couldn't afford it (early days of ebay).
The CGS, MGS, the MGS+, AGS, & AGS+ were all multibus. The AGS+ had an additional bus (or was that the multibus?). The board order was important, 1st board in the upper bus had the highest priority.
The extra bus in the AGS+ is called the Cbus. A long time ago I read that it's actually an implementation of NuBus. There's a board that bridges between the Multibus P1 connector and the Cbus, the Cbus controller. The Cbus uses a DIN 41612 connector, not a card-edge like standard Multibus P2-side connectors, but it's in the same physical place on the board as the Multibus P2 card-edge. Turning an AGS into an AGS+ involves adding the bolt-on Cbus backplane and a Cbus controller. Possibly one other thing (firmware?) but I don't recall.
The xGS line was related to the original but it started to use the custom chips (not quite FPGAs). I think the original was a csc then the csc/2 (68020), the csc/3 ('030) and I think the csc/4 ('040) the processor in this was the csc/4 or 4.
It's awesome to read about someone else who has been inside these machines. :) I have a couple of CSC/4 boards here, and a Cbus controller or two. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA