[vcf-midatlantic] Vintage (yes really) Cisco router/TS

[Dave McGuire]

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