Talk about legacy machines . . .

One man's junk is another man's treasure; embracing the original Ethernet taps.

By Michael Cooney, Network World, 01/05/04

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OK, so it's not exactly an Indiana Jones adventure, but hunting and scavenging around dark, dank basements looking for rare old computer equipment can be pretty challenging.

"You may snicker, but these places can be filled with spiders, snakes and other creepy crawlies so I'm sure to remember to don my leather fedora and strap on my pistols!," says Bruce Damer, head curator at the DigiBarn computer museum near Santa Cruz, Calif., and CEO and founder of The Digital Space Commons , an Internet content development company.

While Digital Space keeps Damer busy handling projects - including helping NASA create 3D visualizations of future missions to Mars - his true love lies in the DigiBarn, which houses hundreds of computer systems and related artifacts.

"We specialize in having working systems and capturing the stories of the folks who created them," Damer says.

The museum houses everything from a 1975 MITS Altair 8800 - considered by many to be the first microcomputer, it featured a 2-MHz Intel 8080 chip with 256 bytes of standard RAM and sold for $495 - to an original sketch of the Ethernet concept drawn by Bob Metcalfe.

"For network gear, the most interesting pieces we have are the original Ethernet taps and transceivers pulled from the ceiling at Xerox PARC [in Palo Alto, Calif.]," he says.

Damer says of particular interest is Dave Boggs' Ethernet drop, which is a "fat" 1M byte Ethernet implementation that fed packets right to Boggs, co-inventor of Ethernet along with Metcalfe.

Show and tell

If there's anything Damer likes better than his work with DigiBarn, it's talking about it. He did just that last fall at the Vintage Computer Fair (VCF), a gathering of like-minded folks in Mountain View, Calif.

The 6th annual fair featured sessions led by renowned technology developers such as William and Lynne Jolitz, co-inventors of 386BSD - the first open source Berkeley Software Distribution Unix system for the x86 platform. It also featured hundreds of working and non-working displays, including prized PCs such as the Apple I, introduced in 1976, and the Wang 2002, which debuted four years earlier.

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