donald, all, comments below.. On Thu, 20 Jul 2000, Donald Becker wrote: > You might have that a little wrong. I wrote a driver for the Ess-Com boards > in early 1998, just before they dropped the product. There seemed to be > some bad blood between Ess-Com and Alteon about who cribbed which design > elements from whom, and what the design team took with them when they left. > > I still have two of Ess-Com cards on my Gig-E rack. Ess-Com was in the > HIPPI adapter business, and both the hardware and firmware looked much like > the HIPPI boards. Ess-Com decided that Gig-E wouldn't have the margins they > were used to with HIPPI, and dropped out of the Ethernet business. i could be mistaken in the chronology and the details, but i'm pretty sure i'm not far off. michael mcgowan (founder of essential) works with me on some networking projects at UNM and lots of people around albuquerque know him well, so it's probably essential's version of the story that i hear. i know that the original version of the firmware was mostly written by david gold and that the firmware distributed by alteon still bears copyright notices from essential. essential was a HIPPI company (which was eventually sold) but my understanding was that they primarily designed the chipset. again, i could be misinformed (not that it really matters much one way or the other at this point--it's alteon's chipset and they've taken it and run with it in ways that probably matter more than who developed the original chipset). todd - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
