2 ms·

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

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.

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.