Cisco 1603 Router

Good afternoon, dear readers. I would like to continue the journey through the history of telecommunication equipment. Today came the turn of the Cisco 160x series routers, or more precisely, the Cisco 1603. Having carried


out archaeological excavations in the warehouse, I found the Cisco 1603 router, in surprisingly good condition, in a standard box, equipped with, among other things, a large amount of advertising and reference books . For me, this find was especially enjoyable because it was with this series that the acquaintance with the routers of this manufacturer began.

So what is this device?

The network interfaces are: 10BaseT, while the AUI output allows you to use a different physical transmission medium, depending on the converter — for example, optics or coaxial. ISDN BRI S / T - this interface is not widespread in our country, I have only seen this in Moscow and the Krasnodar Territory (UTK). There is a WIC expansion slot for installing modules such as WIC-1T.

Here's what the internal world of the device looks like:



As you can see, you can increase the amount of internal memory and replace the PCMCIA card, which will allow you to use iOS 12 version and add support for OSPF, IPSec and other useful little things.

I got a copy with 2MB of RAM and 4MB PCMCIA Flash. By the way, as I understand it, the presence of Flash for this router is not necessary, in its absence, c1600-boot-r.111-10.AA is loaded from eprom, which has some minimal functionality. Flash found c1600-yl.113-11a.bin, which, despite its modest size, had rather impressive functionality - it supports dynamic routing protocols RIP, EIGRP, packet filtering functions (of course, not inspect and ZBF, but established and reflect).



After downloading and conducting the password recovery procedure, a configuration file was found on it, which I want to bring in order to show how little the CLI has changed over a period exceeding 10 years.





The core of the router is the MC68360 microprocessor, which contains four serial communication controllers (SCC), two serial control controllers and an SPI interface controller. The CPU performance is 8.3 MIPS at a frequency of 33MHz, but it is possible to install a MC68040 coprocessor that increases performance up to 29 MIPS at a frequency of 33 MHz (not in our case).

The processor architecture is shown in the figure below:



Data Sheets The

performance of the device, by today's standards, can be bewildering, but it is worth considering that in 2001, when I first saw such a router, the 1 Mb / s channel impressed my imagination with a huge data transfer speed.

Process Switching: PPS 600 / Mbps 0.3072

Fast / CEF Switching: PPS 4,000 / Mbps 2.05

The sale of this series ended on February 28, 2003. The link to the device description on cisco.com

included 2 diskettes for the initial configuration of the router (Win 3.11 / Win 95), but, unfortunately, it was not possible to verify their functionality.



Also, there is a CD with a full set of documentation for all Cisco devices for December 1997.



My attention was drawn to a nondescript advertising poster mentioning Cisco Micro Webserver:


And how many of you remember when it was possible to connect to the manufacturer’s “site” using telnet?

And here is the feedback form. I have never heard of most of these devices (with the exception of Catalyst 1900 with CatOS and 3000, in which the duplex was set on the port by switching DIP from the back of the device).



Instructions for connecting, using the initial configuration utilities, and the router settings form:



Here is a page of history. There is nowhere to attach this device, but it is a pity to throw it away. I’ll put it back to the warehouse, to the company for Cisco 2509, Catalyst 4000 and others ...