
Xerox Alto Restoration – Ethernet pioneers/founders of 3Com visit [video] - biofox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhIohWr10kU
======
EvanAnderson
When Dave Boggs was digging around in the box of prototype Ethernet gear my
heart skipped a little. I sure hope all of that gear ends up in a museum
eventually. While my rational mind knows that there's nothing inherently
special about the items in that box I'm not able to completely squelch the
irrational part of my mind that's screaming "Holy artifacts!"

~~~
agumonkey
Well your irrationality got me to watch it. I hope you're happy ;)

~~~
EvanAnderson
I got a crazy feeling of irrational exuberance when I visited the Computer
History Museum in Mountain View. I called a friend to tell him "I kid you
not-- I am standing here looking at _the_ Utah Teapot." Getting a chance to
see these early Ethernet devices would probably evoke similar oddly irrational
(albeit pleasant) feelings.

~~~
agumonkey
Heh, I wonder how I'd react in front of this teapot, I was a CG head for many
years. I'm not sure electronics would throw me off like that. Even though I
got depressed for missing a Grid Laptop on an auction. I've exhausted that
feeling since I think.

But, spirits of times, still does affect me. It's like an invisible book, I'm
sure I'd love to walk between big IBM mainframes, and consoles.

I digress, I recently went to a flea market. And I took a time travelling slap
in the face. I may be jaded by cult historical electronics, but seeing 18th
furnitures, 19th tech of the day, magazines. It did something to me that is
above the best VR today.

~~~
cr0sh
My biggest "miss" was not getting the winning bid for a VPL Dataglove on Ebay
(I like to collect "vintage" VR artifacts).

That said, my greatest coup was finding an Altair 8800 at a local electronics
salvage yard and only paying $100.00 for it.

------
admp
A fascinating moment around 11:55:

    
    
      - Did you ever find a program called EDP, Ethernet debugging program?
      - That's it [pointing at the screen].
      - [Looking at the screen] That's the new version. From '79.

------
walrus01
... Looking at that early 50 ohm coax ethernet tap, it's amazing... Now we
have $200 Intel 10GbE NICs with 1310nm LX SFP+ (the SFP costs $22) in some
linux desktops and real world 9000+ Mbps speed tests bidirectional to an
internal test server.

Or look at it another way, 1U rackmount 48-port line rate 10GbE SFP+ Arista
switches from a few years ago are now available for $1000 from datacenter
operators that have upgraded to QSFP/100GbE spine switches.

~~~
digi_owl
I am tempted to say the world took a step backwards when it moved to thin coax
with those BNC connectors and terminators.

And the less i say about fiddling with TP and modular connectors the better.

Being able to lay down a loop of coax, and then just clamp on as needed seems
like heaven (though i guess having all those switches allows for much better
throughput).

~~~
Lio
I remember being told during CCNA training, back in 2001ish, that there were
basically 2 types of network engineer.

Those who had brought down an ethernet network whilst installing a vampire tap
...and those who were going to.

------
bane
This is such a badass project. It touches so many things, and the process is
going to teach us so much about our history.

There's been a handful of archaeology projects I've read about in the last few
years that I thought of as _beautiful_ , and this is one of them (a short list
that includes a Baltimore hair stylist who decided to figure out how ancient
Roman hairstyles actually worked [1])

1 -
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873249002045782862...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324900204578286272195339456)

------
equalunique
Funny how the tiny BeagleBone Black they're using to restore the Alto has more
computing power in it than the Alto itself.

~~~
sixothree
I have a Commodore Pet 8032 which is one of the most powerful pet machines. I
found an ethernet adapter for it. I believe the microcontroller on the
enthernet adapter has more computing power than the computer it connects it
to. Still though it's cool as all heck.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
In the Atari ST community there's a hard drive / floppy emulator and network
interface called CosmosEx that uses a Raspbery Pi board internally. The Pi has
_far_ more CPU horsepower than the 8mhz 68000 ST itself.

------
orionblastar
If only they can make an emulator out of it. So the rest of us can learn how
to use it.

~~~
itomato
[http://toastytech.com/guis/salto.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/salto.html)

~~~
kencausey
kens recommends ContrAlto over Salto:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144534)

------
unixhero
A little boring to be honest:)

I recommend the YouTube channel jpkwiwigeek

~~~
kogir
I think you meant
[https://www.youtube.com/user/jpkiwigeek/](https://www.youtube.com/user/jpkiwigeek/)

He doesn't appear to have an Alto though, which is popular here because the
Alto in general was pretty prescient, and this particular Alto was given to YC
by Alan Kay.

