And maybe rename it to something else while you are at it? All those
people who have hijacked the name "Ethernet" for PtP links (all those
"Ethernet" UTP media are really PtP at the physical level, unlike real
coaxial Ethernet) are despicable thieves - now those of us who are still
using the original coaxial Ethernet in the shared bus mode are left
without a clear, unique and distinctive name we once had to refer to
what we use.
MS
Actually the IEEE have never called it "Ethernet", it's all been IEEE
802.3 / XXX{BASE|BROAD}-BLAH.
"Ethernet", assuming version 1 and 2, strictly means thick coax, vampire
taps and AUI connectors running at (half-duplex) 10Mbps. I saw some of
it once.
Regards,
Mark.
<-snip->
Actually the IEEE have never called it "Ethernet", it's all been IEEE
802.3 / XXX{BASE|BROAD}-BLAH."Ethernet", assuming version 1 and 2, strictly means thick coax, vampire
taps and AUI connectors running at (half-duplex) 10Mbps. I saw some of
it once.
I worked with it at my first job at a large government institution.
Talk about painful and unweildy. We had parts of our network wired with
10base5 (thick ethernet) with vampire taps, and had some segments wired
with transceivers which had a pair of threaded "type N connectors" (not
sure if this is the proper name ... it's what my boss called them ...
looked like oversized CATV F connectors). The xceiver boxes were
pretty big (4-5 inches wide) and connected to the node via an AUI drop
cable.
The N connectors were easier to deal with than the vampire taps. To add
a node, you just "spliced" a new xceiver box onto the line where you
needed it by screwing a new length of cable into the new + existng
xceivers, then connecting the AUI drop cable from the box to the node.
Eventually we went to 10base2 (thin ethernet) and then like everyone
else, 10baseT hubs.
The N connectors were easier to deal with than the vampire taps. To add
a node, you just "spliced" a new xceiver box onto the line where you
needed it by screwing a new length of cable into the new + existng
xceivers, then connecting the AUI drop cable from the box to the node.
I've to say it, the AUI cables were an absolute pain in the ass to deal with.
We had also a thick coax with the vampire taps and AUI fan outs from
Excellan. Dealing with the coax was not that bad since we made an
inverted U and had a coax run on each of the two vertical raisers this
particular building had.
The biggest challenge was to go from the raiser using the existing
horizontal conduits that were not that big, and run the AUI from the
XCVR to the fanout unit and then from that unit to each desk.
Before going to 10BaseT we used pre-standard LattisNet from SynOptics,
getting rid of the AUI was a relief.
Cheers
Jorge
Oh, the thick coax and the AUIs were lots of fun. The 15-ping cables from the hosts to the AUIs were always coming loose, and the slide locks didn't help much. The vampire taps tended to either not make good enough contact or to break the center conductor. The N-connectors were easier to handle -- but cutting the cable and crimping on a pair took down the whole network.
And then there was the time an electrician accidentally cut the coax and decided to splice it with black electrical tape...
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
And then there was the time an electrician accidentally cut the coax and decided to splice it with black electrical tape...
He, he, we had all sorts of issues, ethernet was not a very well known
technology yet. We had a radio antenna on the roof and when the guys
doing the install saw a coax they assumed it was their 75 ohm drop to
the radio equipment, never took the time to look at the labels on the
cable, what a mess.
At the Argentinean Embassy in WDC they had a pet dog that had the bad
habit to chew on the thin ethernet cables, we didn't have any TDR
tools so we had to befriend the damn dog to be able to follow him to
find where the heck the cable was exposed and chewed.
No doubt technology has evolved, for some people sshing from an iPod
touch may feel like "yaaa another app" for me it feels amazing !!
Cheers
Jorge