From:	"Brian W. Allison" <bwa550s@***.SMSU.EDU>
Subject:	Re: Ahhhhhhh replay
Date:	Thu, 14 Apr 1994 20:15:26 -0500

On Thu, 14 Apr 1994, What's this button do? wrote:

> BTW what is ATM? i saw this a little while back and the only acronym
i
> have for it is Automatic Teller Machine....:-/

ATM - I forget the expansion, but if hardware is adapted to it then the
packet switching is done at the hardware level. 56-byte packets, with a
14-byte (or is it 14-word) header describing 'from' 'to' 'packet-length'
etc. Basically they're moving the logic down to the hardware level. This
does tend to do 2 things. 1) It forces a constant packet size if speed is
to be maximized. 2) It makes the algorithm, if parallelization is
minimal, run about 1000 times faster - 3 orders of magnitude. (If
parellelizaion can be done to the algorithm, you'll see more speed increase.)

Is it Asynchronous Transfer Mode?? I've done some work with it, but it
was only a month or two, very periphreal (had a lot of other stuff to
research at the time) and it was 2 years ago. Unfortunately, it is not
compabtible with the current phone system, and American and European
packet sizes were not the same. I believe there was a compromise which
arrived at a size in between them, but made neither side happy.

------------------------------------------
Brian (bwa550s@***.smsu.edu)
Michael Crawford = sing.god
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