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One side effect of the network switch was that you needed to buy switches. With the old way everyone could be on one wire. With the new way you needed one port

by mannyv 3y ago

One side effect of the network switch was that you needed to buy switches. With the old way everyone could be on one wire. With the new way you needed one port per host. Switches also allowed for centralized management. Note that cable works on what essentially is token ring, at least conceptually; channel 0 (i believe, it's been a while) is the heartbeat.

tssva 3y ago
Switches didn’t require one port per host. They required one port per layer-2 network segment. The original switches I deployed had a handful AUI ports to which we attached to 10BASE5 transceivers. Hosts still connected via 10BASE2 or 10BASE5 to the “single wire” of their layer-2 network segment. Over the years the cost of switches lowered to the point where it became cost effective to directly connect hosts and reap the benefits of reducing layer-2 segments to a single host. In between there was also a time where most hosts connected to hubs which then connected to switches.
nyrikki 3y ago
When switches first arrived, most of them were unmanaged, or only had basic snmp counters, but they solved the collision problem. I remember my first Internet company, where after getting an ARN for free. Coordinated with uunet over IRC to get them to pull routes from me, turning up our second T1. The second traffic started to flow the collision light on the 24 port 3com fast Ethernet hub went solid. I thought I had routed the Internet over my link.... but no, two T1s through an Alta Vista firewall running on a DecStation was enough to do it with a basic three their web app while backups were running. I had lots of experience with 10base2/5 with more traffic, but the stocastic nature of web traffic was problematic. If you lived through the growth of the Cisco chassis switches, the ASIC improvements that allowed for management was quite obvious. I remember fighting with packet engine engineers, advocating for jumbo frames as default. They wanted to support gig-e hubs, which would have never been useful due to collisions. History proved me right there, nothing simpler than a store and forward bridge made it to mass market for Gig-e
therealcamino 3y ago
If you were ever responsible for keeping a thicknet or thinnet Ethernet network running, you would gladly accept that tradeoff. If you've experienced a floor of a building or a whole department go offline because someone removed a terminator, or (this is real) decided to stick the thinnet onto their radio antenna to see if it improved reception, you'd value the increase in reliability a lot more than the extra cost. There were actually these connectors you could get from AMP that would hide away the thinnet connection behind a wall plate, with proprietary connectors to the machine, just to keep people's hands away from the shared network segment.

by mannyv 3y ago

tssva 3y ago

Switches didn’t require one port per host. They required one port per layer-2 network segment. The original switches I deployed had a handful AUI ports to which we attached to 10BASE5 transceivers. Hosts still connected via 10BASE2 or 10BASE5 to the “single wire” of their layer-2 network segment. Over the years the cost of switches lowered to the point where it became cost effective to directly connect hosts and reap the benefits of reducing layer-2 segments to a single host. In between there was also a time where most hosts connected to hubs which then connected to switches.

nyrikki 3y ago

When switches first arrived, most of them were unmanaged, or only had basic snmp counters, but they solved the collision problem. I remember my first Internet company, where after getting an ARN for free. Coordinated with uunet over IRC to get them to pull routes from me, turning up our second T1. The second traffic started to flow the collision light on the 24 port 3com fast Ethernet hub went solid. I thought I had routed the Internet over my link.... but no, two T1s through an Alta Vista firewall running on a DecStation was enough to do it with a basic three their web app while backups were running. I had lots of experience with 10base2/5 with more traffic, but the stocastic nature of web traffic was problematic. If you lived through the growth of the Cisco chassis switches, the ASIC improvements that allowed for management was quite obvious. I remember fighting with packet engine engineers, advocating for jumbo frames as default. They wanted to support gig-e hubs, which would have never been useful due to collisions. History proved me right there, nothing simpler than a store and forward bridge made it to mass market for Gig-e

therealcamino 3y ago

If you were ever responsible for keeping a thicknet or thinnet Ethernet network running, you would gladly accept that tradeoff. If you've experienced a floor of a building or a whole department go offline because someone removed a terminator, or (this is real) decided to stick the thinnet onto their radio antenna to see if it improved reception, you'd value the increase in reliability a lot more than the extra cost. There were actually these connectors you could get from AMP that would hide away the thinnet connection behind a wall plate, with proprietary connectors to the machine, just to keep people's hands away from the shared network segment.