This was such an interesting time to start working in IT - I worked for one of the BUNCH at the trailing end of the 1980s and we sold other peoples networking h

This was such an interesting time to start working in IT - I worked for one of the BUNCH at the trailing end of the 1980s and we sold other peoples networking hardware as the company had none of it's own. The rapid change from coax ethernet to twisted pair was really something to witness. The original SynOptics LattisNet and StarLAN switches sparked a rapid standardisation effort (incompatible with either). We mostly (tried) to sell 3Com switches and routers as most of our customer base at the time heavily invested in XNS based Lan Manager networks. Within 18 months everything had changed, Cisco suddenly became the hottest networking vendor as all those early networking protocols (XNS, IPX, NETBEUI, DECNet etc) disappeared from local lans and entire companies got obliterated seemingly overnight. I mean, who even remembers Ungermann-Bass? And DEC as referred to in the article started out a major player in the networking space and became an also-ran in no time. All the while the world had gone crazy ripping out coax and madly installing twisted pair. There was a period there where my job involved juggling network drivers in DOS, so that you'd have j-u-s-t enough memory to start Windows. Any customer that needed two network protocols (not uncommon) tore their hair out with memory extenders and carefully crafted config.sys and autoexec.bat files and hoped the BIOS didn't get too radically changed when the next batch of PCs showed up. Horrible, funny in hindsight though.