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Twinax Tutorial
(Information compiled from internal and external sources. Wikipedia.org, etc.)
What is Twinax?
Twinax Wire - Part Number:
TWX
Twinax Connector - Part Number:
TAM
A type of cable similar to coax, but with two inner conductors instead of one.
It is used in IBM midrange (AS/400, System/3x) communications environments.
IBM System 36 & 38
A main frame type system but with a star/bus topology and using twinaxial
cable (like coax but having two cores). The System 36 and 38 are large blue and white
machines with built in consoles, each of their ports support 7 devices which can be
terminals or printers. The devices are daisy chained from the machines workstation
controller ports, linking in and out of the terminals and printers. On sites where
Type 1 or Cat 5 cable has been installed, it is usual to find 'star concentrators'
or 'Loop Wiring Concentrators' (LWC), these simply carry out the daisy chaining of
the terminals at the patch cabinet to enable the building to be star wired.
This makes a more flexible system as the terminals do not need to be grouped in
the same geographical area to be daisy chained. This means that if a person were to
move to a different location in the building, they would simply plug their terminal
into the nearest data outlet and re-patch the connection in the cabinet. In the past
a move such as this would mean finding the nearest available line, diverting it in
and out of the re-positioned terminal, and then re-addressing it.
IBM AS400
This is the successor to the System 38 and its native environment is also a star/bus
topology using twinaxial cable. However AS400's can also be connected over an Ethernet
or Token Ring network just like a PC or a server. The advantage of this is the
reliability of a main frame, with the speed and flexibility of a PC.
AS400's used to be large beige boxes that filled the air conditioned computer rooms
of only a few years ago. Each rack could contain disk drives, processors or tape backup
devices and required dedicated three phase supplies to power them. The modern AS400's
are sleek black machines which are considerably smaller than their older counterparts,
but with more processing power.
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Twinax Tutorial