[HN Gopher] The 40-Year-Old Cable Modem (a NABU network modem te...
___________________________________________________________________
The 40-Year-Old Cable Modem (a NABU network modem teardown) [video]
Author : handelaar
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-04-23 14:45 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| handelaar wrote:
| I'm not even especially hardware-y myself but am sharing this
| because I've been riveted for 20 minutes at the sheer joy of this
| video. And slightly imagining the what-if potential for this
| thing which was essentially shoving 6Mbps over coax in 1985, had
| it ever been repurposed circa 1993
| paleotrope wrote:
| Seems like an example of being too early to the market.
|
| I mean you had BBS' but what else. Did this even do TCPIP?
| Windows didn't get a TCPIP stack till 3.11 right?
| nimajneb wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure you're correct.
| Interestingly though, I have an PC I got from a college that
| has Win 3.11 and has a network card in it and TCP/IP isn't
| enabled or on it. I was trying to figure out how to use the
| network card, but all I can find are a bunch of other
| communication standards.
| paleotrope wrote:
| I was installing laptops with windows 3.11 for workgroups
| in the 90s to get the tcpip stack.
|
| https://casadevall.pro/articles/2020/05/exploring-windows-
| fo...
| smoyer wrote:
| Agreed ... You need WFW or a third party TCP/IP stack.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| There was a cable-based serial terminal networking system
| called LocalNet, which was all over the University of
| Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus circa 1985. The LocalNet
| modems/concentrators connected terminals and computers
| throughout the campus. You'd fire up your terminal, hit ENTER
| for a prompt, then type CALL xxx,yyy (xxx and yyy being hex
| addresses) to reach a particular host. The host just saw it
| as just another RS-232 modem.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It doesn't look like you could hit disk surface at that speed
| with MFM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST506/ST412 and the ISA
| bus was right around there. Removable disk was like 1/100th
| that speed and you'd fill up a consumer hard disk in less than
| a minute at that rate.
|
| Programs were small enough that people were typing in hex codes
| published in magazines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-
| in_program).
|
| I know today we can easily utilize 6Mbps but relatively
| speaking this feels like it'd be the equivalent to something
| like 1 Tbps today. I don't know what the home pc user would be
| doing with it.
| IronWolve wrote:
| I remember when DSL was launched in my hometown by the telecom,
| windows 95, I opened network neighborhood and saw the hospitals
| and doctors offices patient records shares. They filtered that in
| a month or so.
|
| I was on the waitlist for 2 years, and finally got it. Gotta love
| new tech at the time.
| cogman10 wrote:
| lol, I remember seeing network share docs for my town. A packet
| sniffer also gave me just a bunch of passwords because we were
| effectively on the same switch. It was wild.
| bombcar wrote:
| That was the thing that really drove home how the Internet
| was unexpected for Microsoft; they simply had no conception
| of a network connection that wasn't a LAN. Of _course_
| everything else would go through something else ...
| swozey wrote:
| Wow that board looks like a mess.
|
| Anyone remember Sega Channel? I was the only kid I knew that had
| it and very few people have even heard of it. It was so
| unreliable.
|
| It's on my huge list of "things my parents acted like were super
| expensive but now that I'm a working adult know it wasn't" list.
|
| Apparently it was a big part of improving cable signaling.
|
| > The SEGA Channel delivered games to over 250,000 subscribers
| over regular coaxial cable. Games would download to the Genesis'
| volatile RAM, meaning that they were erased from the system's
| memory each time the console was powered off. No matter, though -
| games could be downloaded again in under a minute. It's little
| wonder the service won Popular Science's "Best of What's New"
| award in 1994. The service continued until July 31, 1998, well
| into the next generation of consoles. Many cable operators had to
| clean their broadcast signal and equipment to ensure the SEGA
| Channel could be received, so the very fact that you're enjoying
| broadband internet right now could well be thanks to SEGA.
|
| https://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/20/sega-a-soothsayer-of...
| kristopolous wrote:
| Some people are just so good at this stuff. I've tried to get
| better at circuits for decades but yeah, they're hard.
| randombits0 wrote:
| Analog is tough enough. This is RF, even more difficult!
| toxic wrote:
| A friend of mine had one of these in the 80s in suburban DC, very
| briefly before the whole project failed. You need to not think of
| this cable modem as a network adapter, because there basically
| wasn't anything (except the cable company) that it was connected
| to. The network basically operated as a shared storage area -- to
| the end user, that cable modem functioned more like a disk
| controller.
|
| What it really did for most users was serve as a catalog of
| software that you could load and run, at speeds that were not
| inconsistent with floppy drives of the era. So, if you wanted to
| play Zork I or Miner 2049er, you could do it without "buying" the
| game -- you were paying a monthly fee for access to a library of
| software. IIRC, it was a Z80 under the hood, probably running
| some flavor of CP/M.
|
| As a concept, it wasn't a bad one. In practice, the BBS and
| piracy scenes of both the Apple ][ and C-64 communities made "a
| shared library of software" less of an exclusive commodity than
| Nabu's backers planned for.
| qingcharles wrote:
| These are getting some attention after a guy had 2,200 of them
| stored away NOS:
|
| https://gizmodo.com/why-2-000-nabu-pcs-appeared-on-ebay-1850...
| doublerabbit wrote:
| "all that maths is fun" uh-huh.
|
| How someone designed this product and figured out where all the
| resistors, oscillators, crystals and flip-flop chips and other
| pointy out things go where and were while ensuring it's tuning to
| 15.something mhz is beyond me.
|
| Very cool though, I really envy knowledge of such.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-04-23 23:01 UTC)