Comment by jwr
3 days ago
We used to love token ring style networks (specifically ARCNET) for playing Doom, Descent and Quake back in the day. ARCNET was more annoying to set up and had thicker cables, but it was rock-solid reliable afterwards. Totally bulletproof.
In comparison to that, traditional ethernet (think concentric cabling and terminators) glitched often and one flaky part of a cable could ruin your day.
ARCNET was much slower in theory, but robust, fair and stable and did not totally die under load from a single client.
People may forget that Ethernet originally had a shared transmission medium and collisions were a serious limitation. Switching was a later addition that mostly solved collisions and really paved the way for Ethernet as we know it today.
Trivia: because IEEE 802.3 working group was formally in charge for standards of "local area networks with CSMA/CD", 1000BASE-T has half-duplex mode defined (which nobody implemented) as otherwise it would fall outside of working group purview.
Interestingly, early Ethernet performance studies suggested that about 37% utilisation was the best possible on a heavily contended network due to all the collisions. So a 10mbps Ethernet cable run was arguably similar in performance to 4mbps TR? That was essentially IBM's marketing argument for 4mbps token ring. But TR was more predictable under heavy traffic contention. That’s what we were told anyway…
I remember finding an old hub off in a far corner in 2008 working on my school’s network. It was a rare find then!
Hubs were still just barely still relevant when I first started learning networking, but it was late enough that I don't think I've ever encountered one in serious use. Especially after port mirroring became a common feature even on affordable switches. I think we had an old pile of industrial/scientific test equipment in grad school nobody wanted to touch that was using an old Cisco hub, but my memory is fuzzy.
I've definitely never seen any old Thicknet networks in use, though I have seen Token Ring in active use semi-recently. I never learned anything about Token Ring other than I remember old CompTIA mentioning it existed.
I do have a fondness for seeing this old tech that was way out of my reach or just barely too old to encounter back in the day being used, it's so neat to learn about. ClabRetro on YouTube is one of my few "drop everything and watch a new video" creators.
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Hubs were pretty common when I went to college (2003-2007), but not for the school's infrastructure. They would lend them to students because the rooms only had a single network port. Not sure how long that use case lasted; I imagine by now renovations have happened and rooms have multiple network ports (and the dorms would have wireless in any case).
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Hubs were valuable at our CS dept because you could sniff traffic easily with accurate timestamps
And still people use wi-fi...
My first exposure to networking was a 10base2 setup I got from a closing business. Setting that up to run an ipx/spx network which I could run doom/descent/quake on was my very first intro to networking. Was so cool to see computers across the room communicate back then. Something very satisfying about the way those coax connectors twist in and click.
> My first exposure to networking was a 10base2 setup I got from a closing business.
Exact same! My neighbors (still friends to this day) managed to put their hands on lots of used 10base2 network cards and coax cables / Ts and terminators from a company that closed shop.
So we put those cards in our PCs and created a LAN and we had a coax cable going from our bedrooms (my brother and I) to the neighbors' house. On the third floor! We contemplated using utility cables in the middle of the street to hook the neighbor across the street but decided it wasn't wise (we were teenagers so we still contemplated the idea). We also fancied the idea of drilling a hole between the two houses: my neighbor's father was fine with it and provided us with a really long drill but my parents didn't want to hear about it.
And we didn't have the proper dedicated BNC connectors crimp tool though (and had zero idea where to buy one and were too broke anyway), so we became masters at building coax cables with BNC connectors by using regular pliers.
Them little orcs and humans from Warcraft 2 would then transit through the coax cable from house to house (so around 1995).
tolkien-ring network
First college computer lab was coax 10base2. Got introduced to MUDs on that one. And yeah, coax was unwieldy to work with, but we weren't pulling cables out on accident (at least not without taking the whole case with it).