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Token-ring networks could have ruled the world. But IBM’s insistence on licensing fees made the equipment expensive compared to Ethernet. Token-ring was faster

Token-ring networks could have ruled the world. But IBM’s insistence on licensing fees made the equipment expensive compared to Ethernet. Token-ring was faster: 16 Mbps with no collisions, vs Ethernet’s 10 Mbps in a perfect world... but in reality it was slower when accounting for collisons and retries. No so with token ring. If IBM had licensed the tech without fees, hardware would have been competitive to Ethernet and today we’d all be using 1 Gbps token ring in our homes. But now I’d be surprised if a token-ring driver even exists for Windows 10 or MacOS.

jhoechtl 6y ago
Connectors have been bulky and wires thick compared to ethernet.
- wmf 6y ago
  Which was just IBM over-engineering. Token ring ran fine on cat5 with RJ45.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  They did shrink the connectors later on and move away from coax. There’s no reason token-ring can’t work over RJ-45 with 4 twisted pairs.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Ahem! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARCNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARCNET
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Linux used to have ARCnet drivers.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    It used to have drivers for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_Distributed_Data_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_Distributed_Data_Interfa... too, which is another token passing network. Or at least I had drivers for Linux for them. Can't remember exactly anymore, worked for a while in government institions which used nothing else for networking. FDDI I mean, not Linux, that was an experimental exception. Which was funny, because hey, government, modern equipment? Nope... TERMINALS! Which were plugged into the ring via matchbox-like media-converters going from 100Mbit/s down to 19.200bit/s whith weird parity and stop bits. At least they didn't need a separate PSU(wall wart) because the full DB25 of the RS-232 powered them somehow.
gumby 6y ago
The biggest problem with token passing systems is the cost of losing the token (machine holding it crashes) or failing to yield (when you then have a pope-antipope situation). Ethernet has an immediately worse system (everybody has to do the backoff, and on a crowded network that can be painful) but on an amortized bases not-as-bad system. Also adding more hosts is pretty much automatic. Consider it a positive example of the "worse is better" paradigm.
- paleotrope 6y ago
  But Ethernet worked around that problem pretty quickly with switches. I'm sure Token Ring would have solved it the same way. I think the point about IBM's licensing is valid.
  - rstuart4133 6y ago
    > But Ethernet worked around that problem pretty quickly with switches. I'm sure Token Ring would have solved it the same way. Perhaps, but "the problem" was shared access to a single piece of wire. Switches solved the problem by ending sharing - each piece of wire had exactly one computer. So sure, a switch would have fixed Token Ring's lost token problem - by eliminating the token. I'm not sure it could be called "Token Ring" at that point as there is no token, and no ring.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  > Consider it a positive example of the "worse is better" paradigm. I'd never heard of this before. TIL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
- kens 6y ago
  In the article I originally mentioned "worse is better" regarding Ethernet, but I figured it was too much of a tangent and deleted it. So it's interesting to see you mention it too. Maybe I should have left it in :-)
  - gumby 6y ago
rodgerd 6y ago
Licensing (alongside the MCA debacle) was definitely a driver, as was the more complex topology for even a simple token ring network compared to a simple ethernet network. Ultimately the brute-force improvement in efficiency given by developing ethernet switching settled the argument, IMO. Once you could practically utilize the bulk of the theoretical bandwidth of ethernet, token ring was toast. Switching was the Pentium Pro of network architectures.
bsder 6y ago
> Token-ring networks could have ruled the world. Unlikely. People forget that a star topology (Token Ring with MAU--the MAU was ferociously expensive) was expensive in that day and age--both in terms of technology (lots more VLSI) and infrastructure (everything was mostly wired up with RJ-11/shitty wiring for voice and nobody had RJ45/Cat5). Ethernet installations evolved from coax to hubs to switches as the price came down. Yes, eventually star topology won, but it got there in steps--and Token Ring couldn't do that.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  I never wired a token-ring network with RJ-11. Thats ridiculous. We had 10BaseT with various connectors (fat and what have you). RJ-11 with 2 twisted pairs for token-ring sounds painful. I never saw that.
  - bsder 6y ago
    Erm, that's exactly my point--that I apparently wasn't clear enough on. People didn't have RJ-45 and Cat5 back in 1988-1990. The existing ports in every office building were RJ11 voice (Cat3 garbage) and maybe coax for some reason. So, normally, networking started as "wire the computers in that room". That was generally coax at the beginning. And you would keep adding computers. Eventually, somebody got tired of always debugging where the networking break in the coax was and managed to finagle a single hub in that room. But only one hub because they were kinda expensive. At some point you had overflow and then it went "Connect the main room to another room or two" which meant an actual cable pull somehow (probably a midnight session through the drop ceiling) and probably went into a hub in the main room--but only one hub per room max because they were kinda expensive. And, finally, you got enough computers that congestion was now an issue and you got to use an actual switch (which was really expensive--so generally you only used that to connect to the hubs and isolate them) and could now get people to officially pull cable. This played out from about 1988 (coax dominates) to about 1998 (TCP/IP has finally won and ethernet switches dominate and hubs disappear), I would say. For most of that range, a system based on Ethernet hardware would have been dramatically cheaper than one based on Token Ring hardware until Ethernet switches became ubiquitous (by which time Token Ring was dead)--even if the interface cards were the same price. And, remember, some of the Ethernet cards were GARBAGE, yet people beat them into submission because "real" ones like the DEC Tulip cards were so expensive. One of the reasons for the ascendancy of Linux was its support for so much complete garbage in terms of hardware. And, to add insult to injury, 10Base Ethernet would generally work on Cat3 garbage that Token Ring simply would have no hope on. And that meant a dramatic decrease in your physical plant support cost.
CodeWriter23 6y ago
That’s not the only reason Token Ring lost out. Token-passing yields deterministic access to the wire whereas CSMA/CD granted burst access on-demand. We observed at Wall Street Banks the implications of this difference in terms of the latency involved in delivering market data to traders. The bank using Token Ring had to segment their networks into smaller pools of stations using routers to decrease that latency.
spenczar5 6y ago
Suppose I wanted to play around and experiment with token ring networks. Could I cobble it together somehow with common devices? Is it possible to emulate them in any meaningful way in software? Just curious as someone with no networking experience lower than IP.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  If you only wanted 10 or 16Mbps (e.g. to interface with historical equipment) you could bit-bang it with a cheap 200MHz microcontroller. Then the only custom electronics needed is the analog bits.
_nalply 6y ago
Adding my personal experience from the nineties in Berne in Switzerland: Compared to Ethernet the cables were thicker, more cumbersome to bend and you had two of them, and they were chained to neighbor computers. That was long ago and I was then not an admin, only a user. When my office relocated they also switched to Ethernet. Everybody seemed to be relieved and happy about Ethernet. Just a personal anecdote.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  Ethernet 10base5 were similar cables and similar wiring topology
  - _nalply 6y ago
    When we relocated, the new building already had the ethernet cables we know today. I was very impressed by the cabinets with the switches. The floors had little covers with power and ethernet. That was in the 90s.
epc 6y ago
The only way Token Ring could have ruled the world was if it was developed outside IBM. Instead it came out of the same corporate cultural moment that birthed MCA and the PS/2 line and APPC over SNA (to rival, sort of, GOSIP and TCP/IP). IBM Networking Systems spent much of the early 1990s dithering and thrashing about how to compete with Novell and Microsoft's networking and almost completely missed the rise of TCP/IP both in the enterprise as well as the public Internet. When I first started doing networking development for OS/2 at IBM I had to get special permission to get the $1000+ TCP/IP networking kit because it was "owned" by NSD which really, desperately, wanted everyone to develop applications for APPC. APPC was tightly tied to Token Ring and thus they really also minimized R&D into TCP/IP over TR networks. Although IBM "woke up" to the Internet and personal computer networking with the Lotus deal, it took NSD another year or more to really shift gears, and by then IBM had had enough and dumped the assets onto Cisco for a song. If kens is still around, an odd source for token ring information might be Carnegie Mellon, which implemented a MASSIVE TR network circa 1986 or 1987 with Type 1 connectors in every dorm room on campus so students could access Andrew from …anywhere.
- kens 6y ago
  Thanks for the info!
- epc 6y ago
  Am somewhat incredulous that the original announcement letter for the infamous Type 1 cable is online: https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?appname=skmwww&htmlfid=897%2FENUS184-068&infotype=AN&mhq=IBM%20Network%20Station%208361%20Series%20100&mhsrc=ibmsearch_a&subtype=CA https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?appname=s...

jhoechtl 6y ago

Connectors have been bulky and wires thick compared to ethernet.

wmf 6y ago
Which was just IBM over-engineering. Token ring ran fine on cat5 with RJ45.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
They did shrink the connectors later on and move away from coax. There’s no reason token-ring can’t work over RJ-45 with 4 twisted pairs.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

Ahem! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARCNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARCNET

ncmncm 6y ago
Linux used to have ARCnet drivers.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  It used to have drivers for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_Distributed_Data_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_Distributed_Data_Interfa... too, which is another token passing network. Or at least I had drivers for Linux for them. Can't remember exactly anymore, worked for a while in government institions which used nothing else for networking. FDDI I mean, not Linux, that was an experimental exception. Which was funny, because hey, government, modern equipment? Nope... TERMINALS! Which were plugged into the ring via matchbox-like media-converters going from 100Mbit/s down to 19.200bit/s whith weird parity and stop bits. At least they didn't need a separate PSU(wall wart) because the full DB25 of the RS-232 powered them somehow.

gumby 6y ago

The biggest problem with token passing systems is the cost of losing the token (machine holding it crashes) or failing to yield (when you then have a pope-antipope situation). Ethernet has an immediately worse system (everybody has to do the backoff, and on a crowded network that can be painful) but on an amortized bases not-as-bad system. Also adding more hosts is pretty much automatic. Consider it a positive example of the "worse is better" paradigm.

paleotrope 6y ago
But Ethernet worked around that problem pretty quickly with switches. I'm sure Token Ring would have solved it the same way. I think the point about IBM's licensing is valid.
- rstuart4133 6y ago
  > But Ethernet worked around that problem pretty quickly with switches. I'm sure Token Ring would have solved it the same way. Perhaps, but "the problem" was shared access to a single piece of wire. Switches solved the problem by ending sharing - each piece of wire had exactly one computer. So sure, a switch would have fixed Token Ring's lost token problem - by eliminating the token. I'm not sure it could be called "Token Ring" at that point as there is no token, and no ring.
Judgmentality 6y ago
> Consider it a positive example of the "worse is better" paradigm. I'd never heard of this before. TIL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
kens 6y ago
In the article I originally mentioned "worse is better" regarding Ethernet, but I figured it was too much of a tangent and deleted it. So it's interesting to see you mention it too. Maybe I should have left it in :-)
- gumby 6y ago

rodgerd 6y ago

Licensing (alongside the MCA debacle) was definitely a driver, as was the more complex topology for even a simple token ring network compared to a simple ethernet network. Ultimately the brute-force improvement in efficiency given by developing ethernet switching settled the argument, IMO. Once you could practically utilize the bulk of the theoretical bandwidth of ethernet, token ring was toast. Switching was the Pentium Pro of network architectures.

bsder 6y ago

> Token-ring networks could have ruled the world. Unlikely. People forget that a star topology (Token Ring with MAU--the MAU was ferociously expensive) was expensive in that day and age--both in terms of technology (lots more VLSI) and infrastructure (everything was mostly wired up with RJ-11/shitty wiring for voice and nobody had RJ45/Cat5). Ethernet installations evolved from coax to hubs to switches as the price came down. Yes, eventually star topology won, but it got there in steps--and Token Ring couldn't do that.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
I never wired a token-ring network with RJ-11. Thats ridiculous. We had 10BaseT with various connectors (fat and what have you). RJ-11 with 2 twisted pairs for token-ring sounds painful. I never saw that.
- bsder 6y ago
  Erm, that's exactly my point--that I apparently wasn't clear enough on. People didn't have RJ-45 and Cat5 back in 1988-1990. The existing ports in every office building were RJ11 voice (Cat3 garbage) and maybe coax for some reason. So, normally, networking started as "wire the computers in that room". That was generally coax at the beginning. And you would keep adding computers. Eventually, somebody got tired of always debugging where the networking break in the coax was and managed to finagle a single hub in that room. But only one hub because they were kinda expensive. At some point you had overflow and then it went "Connect the main room to another room or two" which meant an actual cable pull somehow (probably a midnight session through the drop ceiling) and probably went into a hub in the main room--but only one hub per room max because they were kinda expensive. And, finally, you got enough computers that congestion was now an issue and you got to use an actual switch (which was really expensive--so generally you only used that to connect to the hubs and isolate them) and could now get people to officially pull cable. This played out from about 1988 (coax dominates) to about 1998 (TCP/IP has finally won and ethernet switches dominate and hubs disappear), I would say. For most of that range, a system based on Ethernet hardware would have been dramatically cheaper than one based on Token Ring hardware until Ethernet switches became ubiquitous (by which time Token Ring was dead)--even if the interface cards were the same price. And, remember, some of the Ethernet cards were GARBAGE, yet people beat them into submission because "real" ones like the DEC Tulip cards were so expensive. One of the reasons for the ascendancy of Linux was its support for so much complete garbage in terms of hardware. And, to add insult to injury, 10Base Ethernet would generally work on Cat3 garbage that Token Ring simply would have no hope on. And that meant a dramatic decrease in your physical plant support cost.

CodeWriter23 6y ago

That’s not the only reason Token Ring lost out. Token-passing yields deterministic access to the wire whereas CSMA/CD granted burst access on-demand. We observed at Wall Street Banks the implications of this difference in terms of the latency involved in delivering market data to traders. The bank using Token Ring had to segment their networks into smaller pools of stations using routers to decrease that latency.

spenczar5 6y ago

Suppose I wanted to play around and experiment with token ring networks. Could I cobble it together somehow with common devices? Is it possible to emulate them in any meaningful way in software? Just curious as someone with no networking experience lower than IP.

ncmncm 6y ago
If you only wanted 10 or 16Mbps (e.g. to interface with historical equipment) you could bit-bang it with a cheap 200MHz microcontroller. Then the only custom electronics needed is the analog bits.

_nalply 6y ago

Adding my personal experience from the nineties in Berne in Switzerland: Compared to Ethernet the cables were thicker, more cumbersome to bend and you had two of them, and they were chained to neighbor computers. That was long ago and I was then not an admin, only a user. When my office relocated they also switched to Ethernet. Everybody seemed to be relieved and happy about Ethernet. Just a personal anecdote.

ithkuil 6y ago
Ethernet 10base5 were similar cables and similar wiring topology
- _nalply 6y ago
  When we relocated, the new building already had the ethernet cables we know today. I was very impressed by the cabinets with the switches. The floors had little covers with power and ethernet. That was in the 90s.

epc 6y ago

The only way Token Ring could have ruled the world was if it was developed outside IBM. Instead it came out of the same corporate cultural moment that birthed MCA and the PS/2 line and APPC over SNA (to rival, sort of, GOSIP and TCP/IP). IBM Networking Systems spent much of the early 1990s dithering and thrashing about how to compete with Novell and Microsoft's networking and almost completely missed the rise of TCP/IP both in the enterprise as well as the public Internet. When I first started doing networking development for OS/2 at IBM I had to get special permission to get the $1000+ TCP/IP networking kit because it was "owned" by NSD which really, desperately, wanted everyone to develop applications for APPC. APPC was tightly tied to Token Ring and thus they really also minimized R&D into TCP/IP over TR networks. Although IBM "woke up" to the Internet and personal computer networking with the Lotus deal, it took NSD another year or more to really shift gears, and by then IBM had had enough and dumped the assets onto Cisco for a song. If kens is still around, an odd source for token ring information might be Carnegie Mellon, which implemented a MASSIVE TR network circa 1986 or 1987 with Type 1 connectors in every dorm room on campus so students could access Andrew from …anywhere.

kens 6y ago
Thanks for the info!
epc 6y ago
Am somewhat incredulous that the original announcement letter for the infamous Type 1 cable is online: https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?appname=skmwww&htmlfid=897%2FENUS184-068&infotype=AN&mhq=IBM%20Network%20Station%208361%20Series%20100&mhsrc=ibmsearch_a&subtype=CA https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?appname=s...