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The LA-120 and the Internet
When I see one of these things, a Digital Equipment Corp LA-120, I think back to 1986 when I was sitting at one connected to a VAX. It was at a competitor to Dictaphone, and was getting into computers. They had before I arrived purchased a VAX 750. Hence the LA-120. I remember because I was puzzled. We had just upgraded to BSD 4.3 UNIX but something with the internet was kind of wonky. Things seemed to be quite slow. Later, at a Usenix technical conference tutorial, I discovered why. TCP/IP was more aggressive in 4.3 and had crushed the ...
The PIX
(Thanks to Adamantios for the picture! CC BY SA 3.0 ) Twenty-five years ago this month, I hung up the phone in my kitchen. I paused, my hand still on the receiver, and watched my wife Betsy make dinner as our five-year-old daughter played with chess pieces on the ...
Do We Need Another Storage Protocol?
Those were the words spoken by the CTO of a large storage firm to a prospective Coraid customer. The CTO had taken the prospect out to dinner to convince him not to buy Coraid. It didn’t work. We know about the exchange because the customer told us as he placed his rather large order. What the CTO questioned about was the proven and driving technology behind our Coraid EtherDrive SAN System, the ...
The Flight
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The LA-120 and the Internet
When I see one of these things, a Digital Equipment Corp LA-120, I think back to 1986 when I was sitting at one connected to a VAX. It was at a competitor to Dictaphone, and was getting into computers. They had before I arrived purchased a VAX 750. Hence the LA-120. I remember because I was puzzled. We had just upgraded to BSD 4.3 UNIX but something with the internet was kind of wonky. Things seemed to be quite slow. Later, at a Usenix technical conference tutorial, I discovered why. TCP/IP was more aggressive in 4.3 and had crushed the ... Read more→
The Joys of Ethernet
What would someone who invented ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) say? On top of that, I called my products EtherDrive SAN. Kind of get the picture? I love Ethernet. This is a modern photo of some crazy person (not me) playing with 10Base5. That’s 10 as in 10 Mb and 5 as in 500 meters, or how long a yellow snake you could hide above the acoustic tiles and still work. And ... Read more→
How to Think About Virtual Machines
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How to Think About Virtual Machines: Part Two
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How to Think About Virtual Machines Part 3
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How to Think About Virtual Machines Part 4
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