Comment by ssl-3

Conversely, the only time I've worked with coax BNC plugs for networking was with 10BASE2 ethernet (aka "thinnet" and also "that stupid broken thing").

That was just one long, shared transmission line that happened with RG-58 coax. Each end was terminated with a 50 Ohm resistor. There was no central brain-box or hub. All nodes were peers.

Nodes could be inserted on an existing run by bisecting the coax at any random point, terminating the bare ends with BNC male connectors, and plugging those into a BNC T connector which ultimately connected to a NIC. Doing this brought down the entire network segment in unison until it was reconnected.

In fact, any discontinuity in the transmission line brought down the entire network segment.

So when Bob in Accounting decides to move his PC to a different spot on his desk and breaks the transmission line? The network dips out completely, and without any good tools for a IT folks to pinpoint exactly where that break happened.

Fun times. (Except: It actually was kind of fun for homelab-type stuff when 10BASE-T twisted-pair networks were still kind of expensive. Adding more nodes just meant installing more connectors and maybe extending the line. Now we just add another magical non-blocking N-way $15 gigabit network switch wherever, or skip it all and use wifi.)

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I've never worked with Token Ring at all. If I ever even saw it in the wild, I did not recognize it as such.

I do remember the flame wars about it, though.