[GTALUG] I’m obviously way behind in my reading: IBM owns Redhat

[Russell Reiter]

On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 5:15 PM James Knott via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> On 2020-05-27 04:26 PM, Russell Reiter wrote:
> > I'm not all that sure it wasn't all that popular for Wide and
> > Metropolitan backbone infrastructure fabrics; finance, rail and
> > automobile signalling and routing come to mind
>
> Funny thing, I have been working with telecom, computers and networks
> for decades, but have never, not once, seen FDDI implemented anywhere.


I don't necessarily think that's a funny thing, you don't typically get the
pedigree of every network your data traverses, unless you actually
search for it.

>
> On the other hand, I know that the the LRTs in the Toronto area have
> lots of Ethernet over fibre.  For example, on the Finch line, there are
> some 432 strands of fibre, connected to standard switches and routers.
> Another technology that has been used is something called "resilient
> packet ring", which is Ethernet in a ring configuration, for
> redundancy.  I have worked with equipment that supports it.  There was
> also a TDM technology called SONET that was employed in rings.  I have a
> bit of experience with it, from back in my Unitel days.
>

Toronto is a pretty late adopter of LRT tech, so in that sense, others have
done our structural groundwork for us. I rode my first articulated urban
LRT vehicle in Europe in 1967. The pilot LRT project for Toronto didn't
materialize til 2001. Sure we had a couple of bendy buses but surface LRT
was not on the Toronto transit radar at all; not for all those decades.

World class Toronto is a buzz word politicians and business people like to
toss around, but in some way's it's still just plain old Hogtown. Sometimes
parsimonious, sometimes provincial and sometimes petulant. At it's worst,
it can be all those things at once. At its best it rises above all those
all too human failings, to pull together and get the job done.

Like now during covid-19, we are all pulling together by standing apart.

Probably the best transit design in the history of the city was the Prince
Albert viaduct which added the subway tracks under that bridge long before
there were subways in the area to connect those tracks to. That was world
class hometown capacity planning, in its day.


> BTW, my first experience with ring networks was on the Air Canada
> reservation system, when it was at 151 Front St. W..  That system used
> time division multiplexing, rather than packets on a LAN. There were 2
> versions at 8 Mb and 2 Mb.  All the various devices, such as disks, tape
> stands and more were connected to these rings.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resilient_Packet_Ring
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_networking


Wasn't that Air Canada system linked to the US carriers through SABRE Inc's
frame relay system which allowed consumers to be able to access a
computerized booking system using DTMF tones.

They'd navigate a voice menu in order to check their flight plan
data. Reservation agents had one data access point to add, modify and
delete computerized reservation data and speak to consumers at the same
time. Once booked, customers phoned into voice messaging to be informed of
current flight info, or choose to connect to an agent as needs be.
.
It's all old hat now, but back in the day, it was wait and wait on the line
for an agent to pick up the phone. Not like today where you ... wait and
wait on the line to speak to an agent.

The only difference between then and now is that while you wait, instead of
counting phone rings, a computer with a much sexier voice than HAL tells
you, the average wait time, your number in the wait que and some of the
fabulous timeshare offerings the company has for you, once you've waited
long enough to talk to a human who might be actually able to solve your
booking problem.


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-- 
Russell
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