3 ms·
That sounds very interesting! If you were working with their government, why did you need to smuggle them in?
by MichaelGG 9y ago
That sounds very interesting! If you were working with their government, why did you need to smuggle them in?
- pdkl95 9y agoWe - as manufacturers of HIPPI NICs and crossbar switches - we were technically just supplying OEM parts to a Canadian company. They were the people trying to sell a giant turn-key censorship solution to the Malaysian government. I believe we were simply trying to "help our biggest customer" with an IBM-style field service tech. Also, this was a rush fix. Flying me on the next flight was supposedly faster than the usual shipping/courier services? At least that's what the boss believed? I never got the full explanation, but I suspect that the Canadian company was ~30-50 hours away from losing the entire deal, which was supposed to be our main (only?) source of revenue until we could ship an important new product[4] a few months later. With the benefit of hindsight, instead of a rational, sound plan, the whole situation smells more like a panic about losing VC funding. [4] We had re-purposed 8 & 16 port crossbar switches where each port could be (mix-n-match): HIPPI, FC, ATM, 2xFDDI, 2xSCSI3 (!), 1000BASE-T, or 8x(100BASE-TX/FX) with arbitrary layer-3 routing and arbitrary tunneling. Two switches with SCSI and ATM ports did something similar to FCoE/iSCSI... in 1996. RAID 1 over 10km of fiber was awesome. Except it never shipped, because everyone was focused on our broken NIC. --sigh--