Comment by HarHarVeryFunny
3 days ago
Short version:
Token Ring was a networking alternative to Ethernet.
With Ethernet when a node wants to transmit it just does so, then backs off and retries if there was a collision (someone else trying to transmit at the same time).
Token Ring avoided collisions by passing a "permission to transmit" token from node to node in circular (ring) fashion.
> With Ethernet when a node wants to transmit it just does so
Depends on the Ethernet variant. Older versions have collision detection as you describe. More recent versions are point-to-point full-duplex and thus collision free, with the outlier of 10base-T1S, which uses a virtual token ring for collision avoidance.
Token Ring functions a bit like a ham radio net in my understanding