🚀 go-pugleaf

I got about 10 responses on Excelan products and did some
digging myself and have the following to report.
Basically they make excellent hardware and their software has evolved 
from a shaky start to the current one where it is quite featureful 
and supports all the latest characteristics of TCP/IP.
Their basic approach is to provide a board that plugs into the backplane
((Unibus, Qbus, Multibus, VMEbus and the IBM PC)) of your machine
and drives the Ethernet from the board.  Teh board also contains
the full TCP/IP software.  The host level software makes library
calls (library software provided on a pe operating system basis)
to do the usual things (open, send/receive, close,...) thus 
freeing up the host to do other things than messing with packet
level interrupts and checksums.  There are arguments for and
against this apporach to doing networking.  I wont
detail them here.  One misfeature of the current implementation is
that since Excellan terminates the IP protocol in
the offhost processor and that offhost processor has no provision
for multiple network interfaces it cannot act as a gateway device
in an Internet environment.  

The operating systems currently supported are Xenix, Unix System V,
(for the VAX), VMS (including for the MicroVaxII), RSX-11M,PC-DOS
and some other brands of System V that are OEM related.


The real sleeper in their product line is a workstation they call
the Nutcracker.  It is a slick development/debugging/repairing
tool that sits on your Ethernet and copies all packets into its buffers 
and then depending on the various sets of filters you have established
it will take statistics of all kinds.  It is fast enought to
do tthis at full speed.  It can also inject packets for any destination
at any speed you wish and can even generate invalid packets for 
debugging purposes.  Quite a lot of work has gone into this product
and for research and development sites it looks like an invaluabe tool
at many levels of design.  The price for this complete workstation
is not low, about $50k.  You might not want to get one for home use,
but its existence in a good indication of the level of engineering talent
that exists inside the company.

The prices on their boards and host software modules are quite
reasonable and they give generous discounts for large volumes.

They are located in San Jose and can be reached at 408-434-2300.

Dan
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