Comment by EvanAnderson
3 days ago
My local hospital system (Premier Health) was all-in on IBM and token ring. I remember being chagrined when they built a new hospital in 1998 and wired everything for token ring. The writing was clearly on the wall for token ring by 1998 but their IT department bled IBM blue.
Fast-forward to 2013, when my wife was giving birth to our daughter in one of their hospitals, and I noticed an unused type-1 token ring wall jack in our room right beside some occupied 8P8C (aka RJ-45) jacks.
BTW there are adapters so you can run Ethernet over Token Ring cabling. We had a lot of them at IBM since all the offices were wired for Token Ring.
I have a couple of D-Link ethernet cards with 9-pin DB9 connectors built in for exactly this purpose.
And that was Ethernet at 4mbps over IBM “structured cabling”?
No, Token Ring cabling was so over-engineered that you could run 100 Mbps Ethernet over it.
I remember seeing those same plugs in one of the old office where I work, always thought it was for some old IBM connection, now I know exactly what it is!