Hi Peter,
"As far as I know, that ESCON fiber is still in use, but taking up valuable space."
Not hardly the amount of space that its forerunner coaxial alternative did, which was and, I would venture to guess in some cases, still is being used for driving IBM green screens. During the early Nineties I signed on to represent the Dormitory Authority of the State of NY (DASNY) to put in place an FDDI network for CUNY's City College of NY (CCNY) in the heart of Harlem. The campus has an underground tunnel system linking about a dozen large buildings. It was used for electrical power distribution, heating and steam, and communications lines.
Every building had scores of IBM terminal controllers and actual channel-attached terminals and printers, all being fed, collectively, by hundreds if not thousands of BNC coaxial cables from the central processing area in the main computing center.
We obviated the requirement for those thousands of caox cables with a single half-inch MMF FDDI-grade cable at the time... the university wouldn't listen to my arguments about forward-looking requirements for a hybrid SMF/MMF blend. I think that they are now sorry for not taking that free advice, although, with turnover of personnel being what it is and has been, I doubt there is anyone there who would still remember.
Now, does all of this suggest that they removed the then-legacy coax system consisting of thousands of black cables? I'll never tell ;)
And BTW, we went on to fiberize an additional four large campuses and set the template for many of the rest of them through a NASA RFP response win that I wrote. And I did speck in and oversaw the implementation of 155 Mbps infra red (free-space optical, or FSO) systems in some instances where off-ring spurs presented themselves, rendering optical extension alternatives economically unattractive.
FAC
frank@fttx.org |
