Comment by pimlottc

My college went all-in on ATM-over-fiber and wired all the dorm rooms with it. It was a PITA. Of course no computers came with ATM support and the cards cost $400+ each so the school had hundreds of cards that they would “lease” them out to students each year. There would be a huge “install depot” at the start of the year where students brought in their (desktop) computers and volunteers would open them up, install the cards, install drivers and configure them for our network.

For Linux heads, it was doubly annoying, as ATM was not directly supported in the kernel. You had to download a separate patch to compile the necessary modules, then install and run three separate system daemons, all with the correct arguments for our network, just to get a working network device. And of course you had to download all the necessary packages with another computer, since you couldn’t get online yet. This was the early 2000s, so WiFi was not really common yet.

Even once you got online, one of the admins would randomly crash every so often and you’d have to restart to get back online. It was such a pain.