Inside a Fujitsu Ethernet chip from 1984 | Hacker News Reader

Inside a Fujitsu Ethernet chip from 1984

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109 pointssohkamyung20 comments

i remember the first ethernet card i ever bought. it must have been around 1989 and was for an Altos 486-based (or was it 386?) sco xenix machine. it was eye-wateringly expensive and required the kernel to be re-compiled to incorporate the ethernet device driver. i was frankly amazed when it actually worked! dunno what the actual ethernet chipset was.

Probably an AMD LANCE (AMD7990) or possibly the Intel 82596. I remember the latter as being a bit buggy.

Everything back then was a bit buggy.

I had an old ISA bus 386/486ish thing with linux on it. I was so excited when I got it to run X and I could connect to my other computer and set the DISPLAY and run programs here or there and have them display on this thing just like my X terminal in the office.

Except -- the network only worked when I moved the mouse! It worked fine without X turned on but running X? No soap.

Turns out the network card and the mouse shared an interrupt. Moved some jumpers or moved some teeny tiny switches and everything "worked".

Old time computers only worked because they were extremely simple or someone put a bunch of effort into configuring it for a specific scenario. Heck, in the old-old days even the memory was persistent (core) so turning the computer off "just stopped the clock".

These days everything has a modest computer and a simple network and speaks a simple protocol to allow everything to establish a local topology "on boot".

Wow! Now that's something you don't see every day.

I am always amazed at how Ethernet has stood the test of time.

So so excited when Bob Metcalfe was finally awarded the 2022 Turing Award for this groundbreaking, yet often under-appreciated, invention: https://awards.acm.org/about/2022-turing.

Off topic - what a pleasant UX - it loads instantly, it scrolls instantly, it doesn't reload/reflow several times while scrolling down, and there are no bloody adverts!

Could be better

> To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript

It's mastadon, is there anything preventing someone else from writing a server that renders everything server side without javascript for you?

In the "good old days", the Mastodon read-only timeline worked perfectly with plain HTML, no JavaScript was required. Unfortunately this decision was eventually reversed.

The news here is that Fujitsu also made chips. When/why did they stop ?

Fujitsu decided to stop manufacturing semiconductors around 2014. This was part of a "series of realignments"; Fujitsu decided to focus on information technology and cloud computing due to foreign competition.

Ref: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Fujitsu-to-wind-down-chip-p...

I think they made lots of the SPARC processors for Sun? They were definitely big news in the 90s.

They also made very impressive HDs in the 80s, they are definitely one of the great tech companies that maybe don't get the recognition they deserve.

If I understand correctly, Fujitsu spun off their chip manufacturing arms in the mid 2010's, but still design chips.

The Fujitsu A64FX microprocessor currently powers the world's second fastest supercomputer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX

> The processor is replacing the SPARC64 V as Fujitsu's processor for supercomputer applications.

Now, this is sad.

The last iteration of Fujitsu’s SPARC sounds pretty interesting:

“Sparc64-XII cores run at 3.9 GHz on the 20nm process by TSMC. 5.5 billion transistors and 153 GB/sec memory bandwidth. The CPU package features up to 12 cores × 8-way SMT (96 threads).”

Sounds like a great CPU for a winter laptop.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1647627682421567491

now here's something that does work without javascript https://nitter.nl/kenshirriff/status/1647627682421567491

Thanks!

No thanks.

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