3 ms·
did coax ethernet ever work reliably? I remember spending entire days fiddling with cables and terminators trying to get multiplayer quake to work over a networ
by phpnode 14y ago
did coax ethernet ever work reliably? I remember spending entire days fiddling with cables and terminators trying to get multiplayer quake to work over a network, we almost always had to resort to (very slow) serial ports instead.
- cpr 14y agoMIT did use it for some years before commercial Ethernet eventually displaced CHAOSnet (I was gone by then), but, yeah, it was a constant struggle to keep it working reliably. People would work in the cable spaces and ding or crimp the coax outer shield, and we'd have to go find it.
- hga 14y agoYeah, coax Ethernet did work reliability, or at least enough to get the job done, but none of us missed it when twisted pair became available, it was a major pain when a physical disruption would take out a whole cable segment. Note the original coax for commercial Ethernet was quite a bit narrower and more flexible than that used for the CHAOSnet. From very old memory, something close to maybe 3/4ths? vs. 0.375 of an inch for what came to be named 10BASE5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 Original research Ethernet also used narrower coax. Here's Wikipedia on CHAOSnet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaosnet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaosnet ; it seems to be pretty accurate.