We recently pulled out this old 2U rackmount server. I set it up 10+ years ago as a personal file server, and recently realized the server wasn’t powering on. We determined the power supply had failed and then tried to figure out where this machine came from. With some help from our supporters, here’s what […]
I ran across this article written by Bob Metcalfe in 1991 about 3Com’s losing bets against Novell. This contained an important fact in our research about Ethernet development in the 1980s. To summarize the article, those losing bets were: Thanks to David Strom who originally posted scans of this on his Happy 40th birthday, Ethernet […]
In our 1980s networking research, we came across this: a 1988 paper out of the National University of Singapore where Gee-Swee Poo and Tiow-Seng Tan benchmarked the file server performance of 3Com 3Plus, Novell Advanced Netware 286, and IBM PC Network, all running on IBM PC ATs (plus the dedicated 3Com 3Server thrown in for […]
The Triangle Universities Computation Center was formed in 1966, a partnership between 3 universities in central NC to create computer time sharing services: Photo from Hickory Daily Record Sept 16 1968. Caption: Students, faculty and researchers at 38 North Carolina colleges and universities will be transmitting and receiving answers to thousands of problems daily this […]
Our story today begins the way many readers will be quite familiar with; one evening, while killing time looking at surplus networking equipment on eBay, I happened across a piece of hardware that immediately grabbed my attention. The description did not add much more of value, other than directing me back to the single image […]
Most of us use curl daily without thinking about it. In our new video, we learn how Daniel Stenberg first got involved in programming and became the lead maintainer of curl. The story starts simpler than you might expect: an IRC bot built in the early 1990s to help manage some channels. That path led […]
VLANs VLANs are an everyday staple in networking today. We wanted to discover exactly how, and when, they came about. In everyday homelab/prosumer, small business and many enterprise networks, routers and switches use VLAN tags, which were defined by the 802.1Q standard. This feels like a concept that has been around forever, and I was […]
Using modems has been close to the core of our focus in re-exploring 1990s tech since we started working on The Serial Port back in 2023. After we got our simulated dial-up ISP working, I had been thinking about doing a demo of combining multiple modems together. We knew multilink PPP was a thing – […]
We just dropped what might be our most personal video yet – a deep dive into the history of Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. And honestly? Making this one hit different. For those of you who weren’t around in the ’90s (or weren’t online yet), IRC might seem like ancient history. But here’s the thing: […]
A question no one has asked: could you take a 90s BBS and compile it from source using modern dev tools? We decided to find out using Impulse BBS, a platform that was huge in the underground scene back in the day. Why Impulse? Impulse was popular with scene BBSes—those invitation-only underground boards that were […]