HYPERchannel, sometimes rendered Hyperchannel, was a

local area networking A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...

system for mainframe computers, especially

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

s, introduced by

Network Systems Corporation Network Systems Corporation (NSC) was an early manufacturer of high-performance computer networking products. Founded in 1974, NSC produced hardware products that connected IBM and Control Data Corporation (CDC) mainframe computers to peripherals ...

in the 1970s. It ran at the then-fast speed of 50 Mbits/second, performance that would not be matched by commodity hardware until the introduction of

Fast Ethernet In computer networking, Fast Ethernet physical layers carry traffic at the nominal rate of 100 Mbit/s. The prior Ethernet speed was 10 Mbit/s. Of the Fast Ethernet physical layers, 100BASE-TX is by far the most common. Fast Ethern ...

in 1995. HYPERchannel ran over very thick

coax cable Coaxial cable, or coax (pronounced ) is a type of electrical cable consisting of an inner conductor surrounded by a concentric conducting shield, with the two separated by a dielectric ( insulating material); many coaxial cables also have a p ...

fibre optic An optical fiber, or optical fibre in Commonwealth English, is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means to ...

extensions and required adaptor hardware the size of a

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...

. The

networking protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchroniza ...

was entirely proprietary. Solutions for

Control Data Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywel ...

, IBM and

Cray Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...

computers were their primary products, but a wide variety of support emerged in the 1980s, including

DEC VAX VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The VA ...

and similar

superminicomputer A superminicomputer, colloquially supermini, is a high-end minicomputer. The term is used to distinguish the emerging 32-bit architecture midrange computers introduced in the mid to late 1970s from the classical 16-bit systems that preceded the ...

s. The introduction of 10 mbit/sec

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

in the 1980s was a major problem for the HYPERchannel product, one the company never clearly addressed. The company introduced products to allow HYPERchannel protocols to travel over Ethernet, and systems that allowed Ethernet-equipped computers to connect to HYPERchannel systems, as well as

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

and other standard protocol support. However, these generally had the side-effect of further eroding the need for the product, other than raw performance, and it found itself pressed into an ever smaller niche that was eventually killed off by new systems with dramatically higher performance.

Hyperchannel operation

"Hyperchannel" referred to an early, proprietary LAN protocol. The earlier, "A-series" Hyperchannel "adapter" had a device interface and a trunk (LAN) interface, which could drive up to four coaxial trunks, each carrying 50 Mbit/s. Intercommunication between adapters was always across the trunk. The A-series adapter had a processor made from discrete, high-speed ECL components, with an 8K program memory and a 4K or an 8K data memory. Data memory was divided, so that one half could be being filled from the device interface while the other half was emptying onto the trunk interface, or vice versa. The device interface was interchangeable, and could use a selected board to attach to an IBM FIPS channel, or to a Cray channel, CDC channel, or to a communications link so it could communicate with remote installations. A major product was RDS (Remote Device Support), in which an IBM mainframe could connect to an adapter through its FIPS channel, which would communicate over a trunk to an adapter with a comms link, possibly to another continent, where it could drive a remote FIPS channel to drive IBM peripherals such as tape units, printers and the like. This gave remote backup possibilities to save data onto a remote site in real time, to protect data in case of disaster at the host location. Both sites could have host computers, and backup could be bidirectional. For RDS, the remote adapter emulated the IBM host by producing the channel protocol. The Hyperchannel Trunk was a LAN made of up to four parallel coaxial cables carrying 50 Mbit/s, which, at the time, was considered bleeding-edge technology. There could be many adapters on the trunk, so that, for example, mainframes of different types could inter-communicate across the trunk network that could also have an adapter for telecomms links to other locations. If a trunk was busy, the adapter would try the next trunk. Trunk protocol was timing-based, and three timers had to be manually calculated and set on each adapter due to data being limited to the speed of light (which travels at about 1 ft/nS), and if a new adapter was installed on the trunk (thus changing the length of the trunk), the timers on all adapters on the trunk had to be revised. Each adapter had an address, set on thumb-wheel switches. The A-series adapter was later supplanted by the DX adapter, which was microprocessor-based, and could contain a selection of device cards, trunk boards, link boards, as well as LAN and WAN cards including Ethernet, FDDI, Token Ring, or an IP router board for IP communication, in a chassis of up to 16 slots. As it could contain more than one device interface board, it could handle inter-device communication without resort to the Hyperchannel trunk, which was only retained for communication with legacy equipment.

References

* * * {{cite techreport , url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tLbRpvayMm8C&pg=PA16 , title= Fiber Optics and Communications , page=16 Local area networks