Comment by gh02t
3 days ago
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.
Back in 1999 I was still doing the crawling-under-desks thing. I was at a tobacco companies sales office... and they had a wallplate with ports labeled token ring, ethernet, and appletalk (looked rj11, so phonenet?). A year or two later I worked at their central location in Virginia in a warehouse decommisioning old equipement, got to see some FDDI and HIPPI hardware. Never saw it being used though.
And at my previous job, in a quite normal office, there was a wallplate labeled DEC with the weirdest jack I've ever seen. I couldn't visually identify it, and I thought I knew everything. 1.5" inches wide, with a plastic spring-loaded cover that came down from the top. Maybe only two conductors in it, not normal rj-style pins at all. I'd guess something Vax, but I thought those were always ethernet since the early 80s, and anything older still wouldn't likely have survived until 2025.
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).
You were one generation before me, I started college in 2007. By then it was all those super cheap little 4 port Netgear switches most people reading this have probably owned at some point. I don't remember us having official dorm wifi but we were allowed to have our own wireless routers, probably an IT nightmare by today's standards. I recall we also all got publicly routable IP4s.
Hubs were valuable at our CS dept because you could sniff traffic easily with accurate timestamps
And still people use wi-fi...