At university, this was late 1997, we all lived in blocks of flats on campus, 5 students to a flat. We also ran 10Base2 (ethernet over coax) from room to room, and then from one window to another in the next flat and did lan gaming. No internet, no phone lines, just quake, doom, grand theft auto 1, civilization 2, etc. Great days.

😂me the same. C'mon there must be thousands out there who experienced this eureka nerd thrill...

And then the letdown when you add more computers. Sure it worked for the ocasional 4 pc msdos lan party with IPX (which i had plenty), but any issue with the cable, connectors or the computers, and the whole thing would freeze. Admittedly it wasn't a big deal for a lan gaming session, most of those old games could not even continue if one player left and had to be restarted anyway. But in a working environment, like a shop running business hours, it was a PITA. Until it became star shaped, and hubs gave way to switches, Ethernet was very annoying, but at least it was an open standard just like the PC was cloned which made it popular Yes i used it in the early 90ies, netware coax, bnc, t connectors, terminators. I probably still have some around... If only arcnet was made open back then. That's like scsi vs ide at the networking level. Ethernet is so different now, where are the vampire clamps? 🙂

I don't think we used IPX. I'm sure we used IP, with Windows 95.

@@MostlyPennyCat DOOM would have been IPX.

That makes sense, most of the commands used in industrial controllers are relatively tiny. Some devices only need a couple of bits to operate but the timing and reliability needs to be perfect.

That's a perfect job for a CAN.

Oooh, that makes sense! In fact, thinking about it now, it's pretty obvious that's what the point of the token-passing scheme is. So I take it the machines you're talking about were running a realtime operating system? I'm curious to know which one (unless it was totally proprietary). It's funny, because I was a pretty young kid back when arcnet was a thing. I was aware of it, but that's about it. I knew about IBM token ring, but never used it. Briefly, how do token ring and arcnet differ?

​@@LMB222 yeah a can of beer can resolve most problems. Lol

I do know places that packed blue tack in there to stop users changing the values.

Some things are just more of an HR problem, and not an IT one....

Nice view from the side of the IT-Department ... Of course are those bloody users all "misinformed" and that the device they had to work with day after day (their tool!) was so effing SLOW that they got "creative" here is clearly a sign of low level "terrorism". Yeah, there is no other solution than locks, eventual punishment or putting plates over the "culprit":))) No offense, just another angle of view ... and believe me: Nothing has changed since then. I.T. kept (or doubled) its chauvinism and users are annoying[1] as usual! Hehehehe Thanks for sharing your story, Mark!:) [1] which is just a direct manifestation in how much education the employer is willing to invest into the employees (meaning to pay MONEY). You could also see this as a hidden "eff you" from your boss, as an hour long schooling could've mitigated this problem entirely without those botched solutions:)

OK, fun question: if you let users assign their own 8-bit IDs at random†, how many network nodes can you hook up before the probability of an address collision reaches 50%? †Assuming the assignment was truly random (e.g. tossing coins or dice or something), not subject to the usual unconscious human biases. #BirthdayParadox

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 it’s an interesting puzzle, our issue was a group of users trying to set the address to a really low number. Ironically the address area where the servers and printer gateways were. Users can’t live with them… but nobody would pay the bills without them.

And you worked with the one and only, Wayne Pan !

@@garymiyakawa Wayne was just before my time but I knew of him. There sure were a lot of memorable people that worked the Chicago area.

I was a systems engineer in the 90s and I used to run legacy ARCnet LANs hosting Novell with IPX.

Thanks, that was what as big part of what I hoped to achieve with these things.

@@RetroBytesUK well you have done that, with a classic British humor that I love. Trying to explain to my young techs anything older than 2010, I just send them here.

One of the advantages was much longer range than even coax Ethernet, and that had longer range than twisted pair Ethernet.

I vaguely remember, when the price was coming down on cards, there were also cards that permitted a two-computer network without having to buy a hub.

@@JohnDlugosz One of the cool things about Arcnet was that at 2.5 Mbps it could be much looser with cabling so it allowed linear buses without a hub just like thin Ethernet, but it also allowed you to make small star networks with resistive passive hubs or large star networks with active hubs. You could also freely mix topologies within the limits of each sub-flavor. I remember encountering clusters of machines on short backbones (workgroups) which all met at an active hub in the phone closet.

It's impressive how much old hardware is around, simply because that is cheaper than buying new industrial or medical equipment. Look up that Intel Quark developer board. A P54C Pentium running at 400 MHz, PCIe, USB2, DDR3, Wifi, it even has 16 kiB embedded SRAM

@@HappyBeezerStudios Sadly I had never an excuse to play with an Quark, but they sound interesting! Yeah, there are still products I know of manufactured to this day that use 68k (the original DIL one, not newer types) and embedded 386, often obtained through more or less sketchy parts brokers. Simply because the product has some certification that is expensive to obtain. ^^ I am not generally opposed to that as long as the parts are not salvaged ones, but I question if that still hits the spirit of those reliability oriented qualification processes...

Steve Jobs wondered the same thing and set out to do what Xerox should have with some of that tech. In the end you can sum it to "corporate focus".

The reason IBM and Xerox don't dominate home computing today is because the management at the time were, according to the likes of Steve Jobs, "dinosaurs who couldn't see where computers were heading". Young engineers at IBM and Xerox would come out with stuff like the mouse and the electronic pen but the management saw them as gimmicks and shelved them.

I worked for Xerox (copiers/printers) in the time frame that PARC invented all the stuff they did. If you've never heard the story, the guy who invented the laser printer at PARC nearly got fired for inventing it on his own time. The suits back east were so pin headed they could not see the future. They wasted money on insurance companies instead of bringing the future out of the lab. It has to be the most massive failure of corporate management in American history.

After all the GUI stuff with the Alto and Star, and other Xerox innovations at parc, when Xerox decided to go commercial with computers they didn't call them computers, they called them "Information Processors". Did they give their "not computer" a catchy name. Nope. They gave it a number, 820. How about a GUI, since they'd invented the thing? Heck no. The Xerox 820 series ran CP/M and was text only. The 820 series used Z-80 CPUs, had 64K RAM, and had next to nothing designed in-house. They took the open "Big Board" Z-80 CP/M design and adapted it to what Xerox wanted to sell. The final model in the 820 series was two computers in one, combining an 8088 PC with the previous Z-80 system. The nifty trick was that computer could run MS-DOS and CP/M concurrently and instantly switch the display, keyboard, floppy drives, and printer between the two operating systems, with whichever one not having access to the peripherals continuing to run.

@@Peter_S_ Yep. Steve Jobs was only a "visionary" in that he stole other peoples work. I remember when Jobs preached "you only need one mouse button", and "a stylus is not needed." And yet here we are with multi button mouses and the I-pencil. Even the I-pod and I-phone were not unique, just marketed very well.

One space after period is enough. This isn't the 1500s, we have proportional typefaces now. Two is already stretching it. Yours is just taking the piss.

Yep - same here. We had a huuuuge PDP/VAX platform in 1985 and kept it going until 1998 when it all got "Y2K'd" out. We had 20 LAT networks and dedicated active ARCNET hubs all over the place. In 1998 - it all got transitioned to UTP - Cat5 - and cisco Catalyst. The VMS machines went away a few years later... and yes - I had boxes of terminators...

Ah, that history and part number helped. Was the breakout of phy from the interface card the root of the mii standard (which seems like it was after the DP8390/NE1000)?

Thanks for the extra information, you are of course correct. I did shorten the section I had on transceivers, as it felt the video was getting to be too much about Ethernet, given it was supposed to be about arcnet. I introduce the idea with the NE2000, as that's where most saw the all in 1 card for the first time, and it and its clones are what pushed down the price of ethernet.

Also nice to get it from someone who designed a board for the DP83901.

​@@ChiefBridgeFuser MII came much, much later with 100 megabit Ethernet and it's actually four 31.25 Mbps serial connections in parallel so that a 100Mbit controller chip only has to pump bits at 31.25 MHz (max) with most of it running at just under 16 Mhz which was fast for the day but still doable whereas a 125 MHz controller was out of the question. The 15 pin AUI connecter was just how everything was done at the start because the 10base-5 cable was usually in the ceiling to minimize overall length and because you couldn't just pull it through an office conduit like phone cable. When smaller networks of 10Base-2 started gaining traction you saw the backbones suddenly become departmental and venture into the cubicle or executive office and we got the pricey AUI thinNet transceivers shown in the video which were usually under the desk or in a 'wiring cubicle' which often held printers and common gear in a cubicle island. The next step was the cards with integrated PHYs, first for ThinNet and right after that you also saw pre-10Base-T AUI based transceivers for twisted pair but it was not yet the 10base-T of today and lacked the heartbeat signal. Prior to then your media choice was either coax big, or coax little. In 1990 10Base-T was ratified and suddenly actual 10Base-T to AUI adapters were common to reuse the old Ethernet cards with twisted pair. Finally in the early 90s twisted pair took off and coax became a memory but there were different PHYs for 10Base-T and 100Base-T and we started to get fiber so the makers couldn't just ditch the external PHYs just yet and it was implacticle is most cases (then) to put a dozen PHYs on a single die in a switch for example due to current consumption. By 1992 much was solved, but the ideal fab processes for a multi-PHY and for a switch IC remain different.

@@Peter_S_ Thanks for thar history. Makes me appreciate how really easy it is to implement hardware now in small devices for 100base-T.

As I was watching it I was thinking "address conflicts must have been a nightmare to work out if you didn't have a list to work from".

@@Firthy2002 You didn't want to be the keeper of the spreadsheet, but if you didn't and other people weren't as diligent your life would be a living hell - so I was always the keeper of the blasted spreadsheet. But at least the network was stable! Also cards with the switches out the back were evil - we only bought cards where the switches were internal for reasons others have talked about elsewhere: those pesky users! Networks are always easier if you don't have pesky users running around mucking things up.

Same here but I was able to use the crimp tool later for antenna coax so it was not a total waste of money.

@@pctrashtalk2069 Oh yes, I've used the tool for other stuff, but remember at the time the tool costing a fortune (Around £100 from memory) and it the Mid 80's that was a lot of money lol.

Didn’t Arcnet use 92 ohm RG62? With the tiny plastic spacer to keep the wire centered?

@@mikebroich1487 To be honest, this was back in the middle to late 80's (nearly 40 years ago). You are probably right, but then I can't remember what I did last week lol.

didn't know that about gigabit... but makes sense, switches are cheaper than hubs now, if you can find a hub

I still have a 10baseT hub on my network... it supplies my chromecast and the AP for my guest wifi. I use it to slow both of em down ;)

@@TheChipmunk2008 oh that's funny, still most likely full duplex so no collisions

@@TheChipmunk2008 is 10 mbit enough to stream video though?

@@TheChipmunk2008 also slight correction on the gigabit, some NICs do actually support a half duplex gigabit mode, but you'd neither find a gigabit hub or be sure it will work since not all NICs have that extra mode. Anything faster than gigabit no longer has half duplex supported at all

Also on collisions the best analogy I used was CB Radio - since they were still pretty popular in the 80's. Two people talking at once = garbage; that's a collision.

When I was first introduced to Ethernet in a Comp Sci lecture in 1979, as I recall, the lecturer had to admit that engineers were already prejudiced against the idea of such a lackadaisical approach to bandwidth management. I mean, collisions, for goshsakes! But he also said that real-world experience was already proving, to the surprise of many, that these collisions mattered a lot less than you would expect in practice. About a decade later, I remember a colleague saying that Sun Microsystems (great networking champions, as you might recall) had done a test involving two pairs of workstations on the same Ethernet wire, the members of each pair exchanging packets with its partner at maximum speed, and overall getting to 98% total utilization, even after the collisions between them. So don’t try to say that “users didn”t understand collisions”, when their own experts kept pointing out the issue at every opportunity. Ethernet won out because it worked.

​@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I don't know about Sun, but DEC did such a report in 1988: "WRL Research Report 88/4: Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality," by Boggs, Mogul and Kent. And yes, for many cases (though not all) Ethernet is quite efficient even with a lot of hosts at high offered load (i.e., all transmitting data). It ranges from about 70% for very short (64 byte packets) up to somewhere in the 90s, IIRC.

Thats a shame for datapoint, if they could have cut the price of their cards back then they could have killed ethernets ablitiy to catch up on price.

After the venture capitalist Asher Edelman purchased Datapoint he basically stripped it for profit, selling off any worthwhile technology and Assets then sold the husk to Datapont UK in June of 2000. In the UK Datapoint had specialized in Telephony systems alongside Datapoint products and they re-purposed the brand to service only this market. Moving from the old book repository building they had occupied for two decades in Neasden North London, the new Datapoint UK headquartered itself in Brentford, England and had 5,000 client sites in 41 countries worldwide. Unfortunately Datapoint (U.K.) Limited was dissolved on 14 November 2013 so the dream ended there. I worked for them in the 80's in Neasden and they were a wonderful company with a real sense of family, with many staff keeping in regular touch today. Our team was still meeting once a year right up until the Covid pandemic restrictions, which speak volumes, happy times, sadly missed.

I cant tell you how many of his books I just loved. Every few years I find my self reading "The mote in gods eye", and "The gripping hand" again.

Those Chaos Manor articles were so much fun. I remember his struggles getting Niven (he never called him Larry) to use a word processor.

@@strayling1 somewhere in one of Larry's books he said about computers that he just used whatever Jerry built for him.

@@greggv8 That was true up until the point in the 80s when it came down to just having a reasonably recent PC. I built a few of those for Larry in the 90s and a bit later, until he lost interest in gaming and a good off the shelf Dell or HP made more sense for fulfilling his needs. When Jerry was first trying to get Larry onboard with word processing it was a remarkable thing to be able to say you had a computer at home.

I was trying to see if cisco had done an arcnet card for any of there routers but could not fine one. I do have an arcnet card for an amiga 2000, but I could not find where I've put it.

Netware had a built in software router - that's how most arcnet to ethernet network connecting happened back in the day.

Vic Poor was the name…

Yes, should have been 8008. And Victor Poor was a self-taught tech genius, and vice-president / tech guru at Datapoint. He, and a young fellow / ham-radio guy named Harry Pyle created the 8008 architecture over Harry's Thanksgiving college break. Both have oral histories online, recorded by the Computer History Museum.

It was a real pain when something was not working because none of it worked.

When runs were longer I ran into cases where station A could talk to B, and B could talk to C at the far end of the coax, but A couldn't talk to C. Some cards handled the long runs better than others. I watched it happen with an oscilloscope... Sure did like the simple cable runs and termination though :)

At my last employer, we had a Technicians’ Department with some folks who knew their network hardware stuff. (My specialty was in software things Apple- and DEC-related, including configuring AppleTalk protocols.) One of the gadgets they had was a Time-Domain Reflectometer (aka “TDR”) which was handy for finding discontinuities in network cables.

I did not know about the internal code name.

Did you know any specifics about the proprietary black dipped PCBs on every arcnet card?

So, just to check if I understand correctly, you ran the cable through a pipe that carried steam through that wall? :-)

@@SatumangoTheGreat no we attached the cable to the pipe.

@@DXMage Ah ok. Thank you for the explanation.

@@SatumangoTheGreat yeah it was the only way short of running a cable hundreds of feet and well going through massive amounts of work my lead asked me for ideas and I said 15 muntes or so for us to test it and if it works then we save a HUGE headache customer saves a hella ton of money we all go home for the day if it doesn't we are in for at least three days work at least and even then it is going to be a major pain in the butt. We tested the signal was well within spec on the other side and it worked flawless. Definitly not a recommended way to do it but it worked =) OH and drilling a hole wasn't an option as the customer made that VERY clear.

You're welcome.

It would be interesting to hear about the evolution technologies such as CAN Bus and how they fitted into the evolution of networking.

Belt-way scale totalizers used ARCnet less than a decade ago. We still have some running in the field, and I have NIB spares...

FDDI was a very interesting technology, I only got to see it deployed twice. Once on a site that used token ring for the clients and an FDDI ring for the servers. The other was a cable company that used it to link their street cabinates prior to using docsis, it was the backhawl for all their telephony services.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Wow... Mine was ipx. This is the first time I ever felt like I was late to the party.

I shortened the bit about how the transceiver started to get included on the card, and just moved to the NE2000 as that was the first card with it included most places first used. There where other cards that did it first including the NE1000, but the NE2000 (which was basically the NE1000 with DMA) was the one that sold in volume where most got to encounter it. Someone in the comment has given a much more detailed history of that bit than I did, as I was trying to not make the video too much about ethernet.

@@RetroBytesUK Ah, you've sucked me into looking at this ancient history. Looks like that wasn't the mii interface. Seems like it was probably the inspiration for it. Motivation to separate the analog parts of the phy from the purely digital functions of the mac.

Mine went down 3 years ago. I felt sad. 😢

There where very cost effective for the time, being able to link the back plane of 3 of them together really increase how usful they where too.

dBase III+ now there is a blast from the past, I remember getting a NLM (maybe for a later version of dBase) and getting that installed and running that allowed for much better locking. It stopped our occasional bits of database corruption, and improved performance for us as well. Its a shame the way dBase lots most its market to Access.

OSI networking ... you poor kid ...

Also despite what you may have heard, the 8086 is not source compatible with the 8080. This is pretty obvious when you think about it as the 8080 has a bunch of instructions that the 8086 doesn't and they have different register names. I believe this misconception comes from the existence of programs to convert code from one to the other. Over time "You can convert between then" becomes "They are compatible".

I got my Certified Novell Administrator certificate for Netware 3.x, just in time for the debut of Netware 4.x. I just bought the big Netware 3.12 book, read it cover to cover, then went to the local Sylvan testing center and passed the test. Wasn't long after that Sylvan and Prometric merged to become Sylvan-Prometric and as most monopolies do, they massively raised the pricing for their Netware and other certification tests. I *was* going to buy the big book for Netware 4.x and get that CNA cert but when I saw the price for the test I said hell with that. It would have been a waste because Netware ended up being a dead end.

I never got to see vines in its special card phase only after you could use etherent. Some times I feel like the only person who remebers it, as I get very blank looks when ever I bring it up among old networking types.

We used ethernet. The cards just had to be Vines compatible. Looks like they added NE2000 and TCIP/IP support with the last versions.We had moved to NT by then. For a brief period, Vines was the only NOS that could scale REALLY big.

Banyan was also one of the first LAN companies to introduce their own directory server (think X.500, LDAP, Active Directory etc).

Microsoft hired Jim Allchin away from Banyan to bring StreetTalk to LAN Manager. A couple of years later we got Active Directory. So in some ways it is still around.

I've heard tell, never got to experience all the relays got nuts my self however.

The coax you are taking about is 50ohms impedance. Always a problem if someone pinched the terminator at the end of a run.

@@gorillaau Ah, to many years ago. My fav was them unplugging x amount of computers and having it go down. So happy when Twisted Pair and hubs came around.

So, the possible event points were: reconfigure after reset, waiting for token, getting token, releasing token, rinse repeat. Or, get token, send packet, wait for ack to sender, get ack from recipient, wait for packet reply from recipient, send back of reply from sender to recipient, rinse repeat. At each of these points a reconfig event might arrive asynchronously, requiring resetting the sending or receiving packet counters kept in each node, except for the times when it doesn't. And theassymetry occurs at the time interval between the first ask and the packet reply. There is where the most danger lies for losing sync of the packet counters.

OMG. Another Domain-iac on a KZfaq. Too bad I can only give one thumbs up. We had a giant Apollo token ring network with the office split into multiple sub-rings that could be switched out/in in the wiring closet when we needed to add connectors to the sub rings

@@ppokorny99 I never experienced Apollo Domains in their natural habitate and time context (it’s not my fault! I’m born too late!) but only years later as nice workstations. The 2000 and 2500 now serve in our Regional Retro Data Centre, alongside RS/6000, Acorn Archimedes, Apple III, Commodore 8032, Atari Mega ST and many others. Coming back to your point: I still need a way to route packets between Apollo TR 12 MBit and the other network systems we operate (FDDI, 4/16 Token Ring, 10BASE-T1L, 100VG-AnyLAN, IBM BROADBAND, LocalTalk, FlashTalk …) What was the main purpose of your Apollos?

Came here to say this, comments did not disappoint. I have put in brand new 4/16 mbit real IBM microchannel cards back in the day, so quite familiar...

I remember getting our first fibre link, it felt so big budget at the time. We had to get due to grounding issues between different parts of the building, there was a 50v potential difference, which was sufficient to kill equipment, and hurt.

@@RetroBytesUK a friend used to do internal IT support for Albertson's (one of the largest grocery store companies in the USA). At one location they had a gas station in the parking lot. The system in that small building connected to the server in the main store using an Ethernet cable run through conduit. Periodically they'd get a lightning strike in the center of the parking lot, right on the network cable. Various computer equipment at one or both ends would get fried. (IIRC they'd also have to pull new cable through the conduit.) After a few times of that the company upgraded the link to fiber optic and never had another lightning strike in the parking lot.

I haven't heard those words in 40 years. Banyan / VINES. connecting remote offices over modems on the vines network. Magical times.

You're right not having to manage station numbers was a big win, once ethernet moved to utp the problems with its cabling randomly breaking and you having to follow the cable around the buidling went away, which then made ethernet the less hassle option.

For a long time, SNA wasn’t even a “network” as we would understand it today--namely, the whole peer-to-peer element was completely missing until a later version of SNA came along sometime in the 1980s to play catch-up to TCP/IP, AppleTalk and all the rest. The new version was identified by acronyms like “LU 6.2”, “PU 2.1” and “APPN” (“Application Program-to-Program Networking”, if I recall).

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 You have to love IBM and their acronyms/abbreviations. However, I have a soft spot for the mainframe architecture as I started out programming using IBM 370 assembler code writing operating system code (for a non-IBM OS as it happens - a long story). As far as SNA goes, and other things IBM, I recall a lot of what might even be called denialism on the part of the IBM technical support community when open systems came along. So many of them had gone through the way that IBM trained system programmers, DBAs and the like that they'd almost been indoctrinated into thinking that the way IBM did things was the only way. Their world was being turned upside down by what looked like chaos. Even when they worked on flawed things like CICS, CKD architecture disks, and the wonderful complexities of VSAM.

Thanks Daniel