Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller

I worked on a token ring network back in the 90s. There were more employees than network ports. So every time someone complained of not having network connectivity, we'd find a network cable where the light on the port wasn't lit up from activity, usually because someone was out sick or on vacation. If everyone decided to come into the office, we would have had a problem, but I don't think it ever happened while I was there.

Token-ring networks could have ruled the world. But IBM’s insistence on licensing fees made the equipment expensive compared to Ethernet.<p>Token-ring was faster: 16 Mbps with no collisions, vs Ethernet’s 10 Mbps in a perfect world... but in reality it was slower when accounting for collisons and retries. No so with token ring.<p>If IBM had licensed the tech without fees, hardware would have been competitive to Ethernet and today we’d all be using 1 Gbps token ring in our homes.<p>But now I’d be surprised if a token-ring driver even exists for Windows 10 or MacOS.

When tearing down some of this technology, there&#x27;s almost an undercurrent &quot;how this works is a mystery today&quot; -- but the humans that still worked on some of these micro-marvels are probably still alive. Have you had success in finding people that did work on these designs, for example in the case of the &quot;universal controller (UC) architecture&quot; which might merit an article all its own?

Author here if anyone wants to discuss IBM&#x27;s chips.

I had to go on a fishing expedition to find a token ring card that had Linux drivers (IIRC it was an ISA bus) for my shiny new pentium pro machine back in the mid 90’s.<p>Those were the days, ‘hey boss, can i build a machine? sure, get a quote for the parts and send it over.’ Nobody gave a shot that it want a standard build it that nodding but me had root, etc etc.

I was sorting out some old box&#x27;s just the other day and in one I found an old IBM PCMCIA Token Ring adapter, in the box with manual and connecting cable. I put it aside, it&#x27;s so old that I won&#x27;t ever use but probably niche enough today that I felt worth keeping onto or selling over e-wasting it.

I encountered the wierd token ring connector for the first time when I joined IBM in the early 1990s. But the proprietary connector got replaced with a standard RJ45 jack later on. But by that time, it was clear that Ethernet had won.

IBM&#x27;s logic synthesis tool (equivalent to Design Compiler) was called &quot;Bool-Dozer&quot;. It may have made this chip, but I don&#x27;t know if the time periods overlapped.

I&#x27;d be curious to see a comparison with the die of something like the ubiquitious Realtek NICs. They&#x27;re definitely a mixed-signal design given that everything is on one chip.

i didn&#x27;t know the actual data got passed from host to host... i was always under the impression that the data was broadcast and merely the token or &quot;talking stick&quot; got passed from host to host in a ring.

do companies ever release their engineering documents for vintage systems?