IBM 610 workstation computer 3360

oh, and for some other random stuff ... an old version of jargon leaked onto the internet and can be found here:

for instance, and entry in the Bs

backbone n. The central nodes of an electronic communication network. The backbone of IBM's VNET network is managed directly by a corporate organisation, and in the mid 1980s ran a much-enhanced version of the RSCS product, known as IPORSCS. The nodes of the backbone, for example HURBB, are identified by three characters of the location name, followed by BB (for BackBone). At a time of a major software upgrade numerous problems occurred, which led to the suggestion that in fact the BB stands for bit-bucket (q.v.).

...

the internal network was larger than the arpanet-internet from just about the beginning until around summer of '85. the network was well along before corporate even was aware of its existance.

in fact, there was an incident when a networking academic type from corporate hdqtrs was making some rounds ... and given talks. somebody explained to him about the internal network and how it worked in a fully distributed manner w-o need for centralized (and-or corporate) control.

the individual replied that it couldn't exist ... that it had been prooved that such an implementation would require a specific minimum amount of mbuttive resources to implement ... which would have had to show up as a significant line-item cost at the corporate level. he personally knew that no such cost line-item had ever shown up in the corporate financials ... and therefor it couldn't exist. it was after corporate started getting involved that you started seeing incidences like the one mentioned in the above reference.

at the time arpanet with approx. 250 nodes, converted to internetworking protocol on 1-1-83 ... minor reference

the internal network was nearing 1000 nodes, which it pbutted later that year. minor reference

... the internal network ... another item brought to you by the science center

externally, bitnet and earn was a university implementation using the same technology (although the count of bitnet and earn nodes aren't included in the count of internal network nodes) ....

minor past reference to the formation of earn (european academic research network) ... some email from spring of 1984

for even more drift, gml was also invented at the science center, percursor to sgml, html, xml, etc ... misc. collected postings:

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