4 ms·
Nothing makes me feel so old as reading something and thinking, "I was there for this."
by ohjeez 9y ago
Nothing makes me feel so old as reading something and thinking, "I was there for this."
- tyingq 9y agoThicknet, AUI and vampire taps. I don't miss that.
- 13of40 9y agoI recall having a coaxial network between some sun workstations that gave me a pretty good shock whenever I touched the exposed metal bits. WiFi is much better in that regard.
- digi_owl 9y agoExperienced something similar at a LAN party, and as best i understood the reason for this was poor grounding on one of the computers on the network. Less of a problem once the coax was retired as there is no direct electrical connection between the computers.
- corford 9y agoI don't think of myself as being _that_ old (will be turning 35 soon) but my first LAN party was done with 10BASE2 and I remember working a summer/intern job at a factory that used a token ring network... So either I'm in denial or you're being too hard on yourself! [ though all bets are off if you were at PARC when they were lighting it up, in that case... you definitely are old :) ]
- peckrob 9y agoI'm just a bit older than you. In the 90s I got my first tech job while still in high school. The company I was working for was in the middle of moving to a new building that would have a 10Base-T network, but the current building had 10Base-2 coax. My first week was, after getting in from school, going around to people's offices and swapping whatever network card was in their machine for a 3C509 combo card that had base-T, base-2 and another port that I think was AUI if I remember right. That way the transition would be easier when the new office was ready. At the end we had a bunch left over and my boss let me keep them. That was my first NIC. I think I still have it somewhere. I gave some away to my friends so we could have LAN parties. :)
- tonyarkles 9y agoYou are correct that the third port was AUI. I don't remember the exact details, but early in high school I bought a box of random computer hardware at auction for $20, and it had probably a dozen 3C509s in it. Add in a 10mbit hub that the school threw in a dumpster... Now all my friends now had Ethernet cards and we could start having LAN parties!
- agumonkey 9y agoI remember reading all these in catalogs. Funnily enough, whenever I read a 10BASE2 I feel the same magical emotion coming up; while I'm jaded by a a 64GB microsd or a NVMe SSD
- pjmlp 9y agoMy emotion is rather anger of having to track down network connection issues by unplugging computers one by one, until I finally managed to find which connector wasn't propagating the signal properly. I have done this multiple times and was really happy when we finally got RJ45 cables.
- digi_owl 9y agoI am few years older and i similarly recall the first LAN party or two i attended used coax. I also once rigged an ad-hoc party at a friends place using a hub with a hookup for coax. To this day i am amazed it worked without any fuses blown or similar. Never had to deal with token ring though, just TCP/IP and IPX/SPX.
- ohjeez 9y agoI had bitter flame wars on CompuServe about whether I should sell ARCnet to my customers. And I still own the hardware for cutting cable and fastening those stupid connectors. So not quite in the PARC realm, but not too far from it.