Look at what I found on the back of the shelf... 10BaseT Hub

[sfx2000]

Cleaning out the office, and on the back of the bookshelf, found this... oddly enough, it's the same X*Y*Z dimensions as my GS-108T switch... funny how time flies...

(I did power it up and push some traffic thru - still works... gotta love the prosafe line...)

 

[KenZ71]

You could put that on a bookshelf next to old time Coca-Cola bottles if you into that kind of thing

I save my old equipment just in case current stuff fails so I can at least have some service until replacement arrives. Although I'll bet that gem is several cycles back in the upgrade path.

 

[sfx2000]

I save my old equipment just in case current stuff fails so I can at least have some service until replacement arrives. Although I'll bet that gem is several cycles back in the upgrade path.

I'll hang on to the hub, as hubs are handy sometimes when doing network development or troubleshooting...

And being 10Base-T and a hub (half-duplex), it's also a simple form of control for someone that might be hogging bandwidth on the LAN...

(That, and being part of the pro-safe lineup, it'll probably work until the sun implodes)

 

[alphamatter]

Yes! I have that EXACT model as well. You never know when you just need to do a quick, down and dirty Sniffing job!

 

[Samir]

Got three en104s with the bnc on the back of them on my desk right now--I use them as book ends. But I'm sure they still work.

There was a neat thread on the netgear forum where someone found a bug in then with a certain dhcp setup.

 

[sfx2000]

Got three en104s with the bnc on the back of them on my desk right now--I use them as book ends. But I'm sure they still work.

There was a neat thread on the netgear forum where someone found a bug in then with a certain dhcp setup.

The ones with BNC connectors - those are pretty old... but they likely still work

Do you have link to the netgear forum post?

 

[Samir]

The ones with BNC connectors - those are pretty old... but they likely still work

Do you have link to the netgear forum post?

Yep, they still do. I even have two accton 8 port switches with bnc in service (actually have them connected via the BNC), similar to this one:
http://www.recycledgoods.com/accton-switchub-8se-eh2005-tx.html

When I was testing the acctons it seemed like their 100Mb uplink ports weren't working correctly as iperf was showing wonky results. I just thought it was old age and they weren't working right. Then almost 2 years later it dawned on me that these are pre auto-negotiation, so they may be working correctly if I manually set the link and duplex. I still have yet to try that. It's interesting to watch a speedtest when connected to one of the 10base-t ports and see something like 6Mb when the connection is actually 30+.

It took a bit of digging, but here's the netgear link. Seems like DHCP IP address assignment makes for some weird issues:
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Un...-which-IP-Adress-is-on-which-Port/td-p/992479

 

[sfx2000]

It took a bit of digging, but here's the netgear link. Seems like DHCP IP address assignment makes for some weird issues:

That's odd - perhaps there's some latent functionality - but hubs shouldn't be concerned with IP layer, much less segment out MAC layer stuff... I can't see a hub having an issue, as long as it works, but if there is a switch in the middle, that might be something...

It's interesting to watch a speedtest when connected to one of the 10base-t ports and see something like 6Mb when the connection is actually 30+.

Hmm? 10BaseT PHY is 10Mbit, and half duplex at that - so 6MBps seems reasonable... The EN108 is a 10BaseT hub, so no surprise there

 

[sfx2000]

Getting all Greybeard on folks...

Anyways... rummaging around on the back shelf... found this - and this one is kinda fun with the story - I was at Qualcomm at the time, and this was early 2G Wireless (IS-95A cdmaOne days) - we were exploring things related on how to fill the 20 story building we created with CDMA, and PDA's integrated with CDMA Data Services seemed like a logical step... Palm was a logical answer, but we really were more interested at the time with Apple's Newton... I was pretty deep into that side of the house at the time...

Apple didn't want to play - they were more focused on Ardis (pager technology) and other partners - and this was pre-Next purchase so this was before Jobs killing off the newton...

This was about a year before we seriously developed the first CDMA SmartPhone - the Qualcomm PDQ-800/PDQ-1900 devices.

I got pulled into the project for two reasons - one, being a Mac dev, I understood the Motorola debug environment (e.g. MacsBug, which was more than just 68K classic Macs) and the Qualcomm IS99/IS657 work - so we started initially with HLDC (which is PPP like) - HDLC was the classic Qualcomm diagnostic interface to the mobile station modem inside Qualcomm handsets at the time...

Palm had a working PPP stack they had licensed from a third party - and we leveraged into that stack.

We made it work - took a lot of effort from some really smart folks - and that device was always loosely coupled - the Palm side was definitely not real-time, but we had to sort out how to wake it up for incoming calls - and the SMS stack was pretty interesting as well - long story short, much of the effort we did back in the day - it's carried thru even to the 4G/LTE USB dongles we see today - fun story, and there's a lot of team effort and contributions behind it - happy to be part of that team...

Getting back on topic - it still works - Plugged in a couple of AAA cells -and the darn thing fired up - and lol, the OmniGlow backlight still works...

It's back to the ROM, so the dialer and message apps are lost from this device (those were RAM based)... the source for those apps does live somewhere inside Qualcomm - most of the folks that worked on it are retired these days, or semi-retired - a lot of knowledge was kept, but the stories there...

iPhone 5s for scale - neat stuff... what we did on the left enabled what you see on the right.

 

[sfx2000]

The historical significance of this particular Palm Pilot - it was the first CDMA IS99 circuit switched data call on that device - took a bit of hacking in the literal sense... once we had that sorted, we were able to take things a couple of weeks later on a true packet IS657 call, but this needed some work from the handset guys, and PalmOS wasn't very happy at the time with that...

So a baby step towards the genesis of all SmartPhones we see today...

 

[Samir]

That's odd - perhaps there's some latent functionality - but hubs shouldn't be concerned with IP layer, much less segment out MAC layer stuff... I can't see a hub having an issue, as long as it works, but if there is a switch in the middle, that might be something...



Hmm? 10BaseT PHY is 10Mbit, and half duplex at that - so 6MBps seems reasonable... The EN108 is a 10BaseT hub, so no surprise there

Yeah, definitely a weird issue. I'm going to see if mine do it whenever I have time.

Oh, I know that. I meant it was funny to see 6Mb when the full Internet speed is usually 30Mb. Of course, <10Mb would be expected for sure.

 

[Samir]

I'm soooo glad you shared this. I always loved the Palm (have one somewhere needing batteries as well), and always thought the ultimate phone would be a device married with this pda. Then along came the treo 650 and I kept using it until gprs was turned off in the US. I still have the 650 and it still powers on and works. And for UI it was light years ahead of todays 3-4 user operations to do something--everything was more intuitive and still efficient.

So cool that you've got that Palm. It's literally the great, great, great, great grandfather of the modern smartphone. Long live it!

 

[sfx2000]

Then along came the treo 650 and I kept using it until gprs was turned off in the US.

The PDQ800/1900 was in many ways the grandfather of the Treo 650 - we did three generations - the PDQ, the QCP6035 (based on the Palm 3 platform) and the 7135 which Kyocera launched...

Much of the development on the CDMA side to integrate the Palm for PDQ has survived to this day in many different ways - and the knowledge gained from that continues even to this day with various USB 3G/4G/LTE modems, MiFi type devices, and of course, Machine2Machine industrial modules...

 

[System Error Message]

I'm soooo glad you shared this. I always loved the Palm (have one somewhere needing batteries as well), and always thought the ultimate phone would be a device married with this pda. Then along came the treo 650 and I kept using it until gprs was turned off in the US. I still have the 650 and it still powers on and works. And for UI it was light years ahead of todays 3-4 user operations to do something--everything was more intuitive and still efficient.

So cool that you've got that Palm. It's literally the great, great, great, great grandfather of the modern smartphone. Long live it!

Today's touch UI is overbloated with bad code and useless features. people dont really know how to code nowadays, its not a simple matter of just writing instructions as thats what you do in assembly. Writing code requires structuring, designing the program in the way of how it should run and be represented, in other words representing a task or algorithm in the most code efficient way.

battery life back than was great. Nowadays they dont seem to care about it anymore. Phones last time would last a week and so would some PDAs?

 

[sfx2000]

Today's touch UI is overbloated with bad code and useless features.

Believe it or not - Android was not initially designed for Touch UI - it was more like the classic Blackberry devices - as a mouse/keyboard type of device... TouchUI was grafted on after the fact when iOS was introduced on the iPhone... that's why the initial devices either had rollerball/touchpads or d-keys to navigate the UI back in the day...

 

[Samir]

Today's touch UI is overbloated with bad code and useless features. people dont really know how to code nowadays, its not a simple matter of just writing instructions as thats what you do in assembly. Writing code requires structuring, designing the program in the way of how it should run and be represented, in other words representing a task or algorithm in the most code efficient way.

battery life back than was great. Nowadays they dont seem to care about it anymore. Phones last time would last a week and so would some PDAs?

I'm so glad to hear a designer say this. I feel like I'm screaming in a tornado because it doesn't seem like anyone realizes this--and that they deserve a lot better.

I have 9 spare batteries for the Treo that all still work. Got them for 50 cents each when no one wanted them. The store I got them from had over 1000 in stock! My dad stopped using his Treo 650 because the sound stopped working (including ringer), so I used that phone to charge and always had freshly batteries anytime I ran out. I got so used to never having to run out of power, it was part of my specs requirement for my new phone--along with several positive aspects of the Treo--like a real keyboard.

So where did I find such an animal? There was only one that met the specs--the now discontinued NEC Terrain. Not only did this have a keyboard, removable batteries, but is completely waterproof and shockproof. And because unlocked ones are so cheap to come by these days, I got a spare which I use to charge batteries, just like the old Treo setup. And I've got spare batteries too, so it's like the Treo in that respect too, except without that lovely UI.

I would love to see someone port the palm os to the android hardware platform. It might be a throwback, or it might be a revolution because of its simplicity--which ironically is how the modern smartphone started before it got so complicated.

 

[Samir]

Believe it or not - Android was not initially designed for Touch UI - it was more like the classic Blackberry devices - as a mouse/keyboard type of device... TouchUI was grafted on after the fact when iOS was introduced on the iPhone... that's why the initial devices either had rollerball/touchpads or d-keys to navigate the UI back in the day...

That's quite interesting. When I hook up a bt keyboard to my phone, I can navigate to almost all the same places using the arrow keys that would require a touch. I guess a lot of that is still in there. I wish they had more of it in there. Keyboard shortcuts? With the real keyboard I have on the phone, yes please!

 

[sfx2000]

I would love to see someone port the palm os to the android hardware platform. It might be a throwback, or it might be a revolution because of its simplicity--which ironically is how the modern smartphone started before it got so complicated.

Trust me - no you don't

At least not the Palm OS that was in the various Palm and licensed devices...

It was always pretty ugly under the hood, and later versions even more so - and the ARM port broke a lot of legacy stuff...

no memory protection, no real concept of multi-tasking, later versions did get a little bit better with application life cycle (and some of that DNA did make it into early versions of Android, e.g. the Binder API's that PalmSource inherited from BeOS for PalmOS Cobalt) - eventually that house of cards was bound to fall, and this is why Palm/HP moved to WebOS...

It's much like BBY moving from their Java based OS to the newer BB10 operating system based on QNX...

WebOS was kind of nice - certain aspects of the UI were pretty cool... unfortunately by the time the Palm Pre's hit the market, iOS and Android pretty much closed that door - same goes with BB10 on the RIM devices... some of the UI concepts have made it into various versions of Android and IOS (everything seems to be a remix these days).

WebOS is still around - powering smartTV's is the most common use, and of course, while RIM/Blackberry is perhaps on a deathwatch, QNX is still going strong in many industrial verticals and of course in automotive platforms - not just for the IVE, but also for the engine/transmission/channel computer complex...

 

[Samir]

Trust me - no you don't

At least not the Palm OS that was in the various Palm and licensed devices...

It was always pretty ugly under the hood, and later versions even more so - and the ARM port broke a lot of legacy stuff...

no memory protection, no real concept of multi-tasking, later versions did get a little bit better with application life cycle (and some of that DNA did make it into early versions of Android, e.g. the Binder API's that PalmSource inherited from BeOS for PalmOS Cobalt) - eventually that house of cards was bound to fall, and this is why Palm/HP moved to WebOS...

It's much like BBY moving from their Java based OS to the newer BB10 operating system based on QNX...

WebOS was kind of nice - certain aspects of the UI were pretty cool... unfortunately by the time the Palm Pre's hit the market, iOS and Android pretty much closed that door - same goes with BB10 on the RIM devices... some of the UI concepts have made it into various versions of Android and IOS (everything seems to be a remix these days).

WebOS is still around - powering smartTV's is the most common use, and of course, while RIM/Blackberry is perhaps on a deathwatch, QNX is still going strong in many industrial verticals and of course in automotive platforms - not just for the IVE, but also for the engine/transmission/channel computer complex...

Oh w wow! So let me rephrase then.

I wish someone would port over the UI of the old Palms with its one touch simplicity.

 

[RMerlin]

I used to have a Palm IIIe, back in the day. Was pretty nice, got replaced with an HP iPaq (forgot which model) with WM5. Followed by a Palm Zire, an Ipod Touch (I mostly used it as a PDA for password management), until I got my first smartphone - a Nexus One.

The interesting bit there is from the Palm IIIe until my current Nexus 5X, I always used SplashID as the password manager. They offered crossgrade discounts when moving to a different platform. Kinda interesting when you look at it, that I used the same program on no less than 4 different OS platforms (PalmOS, WM, iOS and Android). That's in addition to their Win32 client that I use on my desktops.


As for hubs, I still got a D-Link DE-805TP here in my workshop (I just fished it out to retrieve the model number) Haven't used it in 10 years, but at the time, I used it once or twice to troubleshoot a network. Had a customer who was sharing his office connection with the office downstairs, and was having performance issues. I plugged the HUB between the router and the switch, and ran ntop, sniffing the whole LAN traffic. Didn't take long to track down a mail server downstairs that was sending lots of mails...

That was one nice use for hubs: easy traffic sniffig.