TRUE STORY: Back in the 90s I was on a team involved in converting an aging IBM Token Ring network to all Ethernet at a large company. When presenting the investment case to leadership, the Corp IT Director said the following to justify the conversion: "We have way too much traffic on the existing token ring network, and congestion is causing some of the tokens to FLY OFF THE RING DUE TO CENTRIFUGAL FORCE!". Of course an insanely laughable statement, but the leadership folks just nodded and moved forward to approve the large investment. This absolutely happened.

Not forgetting that when assembly line robots were first deployed (like in automobile factories) they all used token ring because it was guaranteed when the data would arrive at the robot. That was important, because if the data was delayed because the network was choked, the car chassis could get crushed, or the robot damaged. Apparently, token ring was unchoke-able. Almost all supermarkets used token ring too, because of the bar code scanners. Again, guaranteed data round trip time, and unchoke-able.

This channel is stupidly underrated

Working IT in a hospital, my friend and I once spent about 3 hours toner probing to find a jack from a side office. After many many closets, we found a storage room with what we later learned was a token ring patch panel from many many years ago! Our most senior IT person on site got a big smile on his face when we brought one of the RJ45 to Type 1 plugs to him!

400Gbps currently being deployed and 800Gbps being standardised with router line cards already supporting it. I remember building 64kbps frame-relay circuits for customers (or 128k for the posh ones!) what seemed like not all that long ago. I feel old :(

Having installed Novell Netware LANs on Token-Ring, Ethernet and Arcnet back in the day, here is what we used to say about Token-Ring... "One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them; In the Land of IBM where the Mainframes lie."

Years before token ring, there was another ring technology introduced in the mid-70s, the Cambridge ring. Developed at the University of Cambridge, this became widely used in UK higher education, but I don't think it had much commercial success outside this sector. It was an example of a "slotted ring": there was a fixed number of packets continually circulating around the ring, put there by a master station, and each packet had one bit in the header which flagged whether this "slot" was occupied or not. A station which wanted to transmit waited until it received a packet whose flag indicated that it was empty, then stuck its payload in the packet, flipped that flag, and passed the packet on down the ring. The only two vendors I can remember were Camtec and SEEL. At 1:18 you mention "one thin piece of coax" used for ethernet. We used to call this "thinwire ethernet", formally "10base2", but it wasn't ethernet's first form. Before 10base2 there was 10base5, and boy was that horrible! The expensive coax cable was nearly 10 mm in diameter, and difficult to bend. Also, you had to be careful not to bend it too tightly, because that would cause signal reflections, killing performance. To attach to it, you literally drilled into the cable, and attached a "vampire tap", which had a spike which reached the solid core. It was dreadful stuff to work with, so the arrival of thinwire ethernet was very welcome, even though anyone could break a thinwire network by disconnecting the cable from the T-piece at the back of their workstation.

The advantage of that IBM Token Ring connector was that it would short across if it was unplugged so that you didn't lose the entire ring network if you didn't have both ends connected at every network location. Without that connector if somebody removed a computer and didn't connect the in and out ports the ring was broken and everybody lost the network. One other advantage the Ethernet gained that helped it was the ability to use the thin "cheapernet" cabling. Originally you had to use a thick cable with a tapped drop line for each network location.

I remember the thick yellow hosepipe cable and vampire taps, a whole computer room running on 10Mbit - and another technology which ethernet also destroyed, 100Mbit FDDI (which was also a ring, actually a double ring with a redundant reverse ring allowing it to use foldback if the line was broken).

50-100 plus coax ethernets worked surprisingly well at scene parties. sure the sparks when hooking up were spectacular but it still managed to move warez allright!

Unless I missed it, there is one important note about the "Type-1" bulky connectors that is worth mentioning. Most of their design was around the fact that because the "loop" had to be maintained, the jacks physically shorted the IN to the OUT when the cable was unplugged.. This meant that when you pulled the cable from the wall, the wall jack would just passively let the token go through to the next node. One of the worst thing you could do would be to unplug the DB9 from the back of the PC, because the token ring would be severed at that point. This was quickly fixed once we started using the token ring switches, but for a while, this could be a problem if my memory serves..

Nice video and good memories! Among the first enterprise network devices I was honoured to work on were Xylan OmniSwitch or OmniSwitch/Router which had a "any-to-any switching" capability. You could have Ethernet, Token Ring, FDDI or even ATM/FrameRelay in such devices (each on their own line cards, of course). IBM became a reseller of Xylan devices and even branded them, probably up to the point when Alcatel purchased Xylan (along with Packet Engines a few months before) to form the Network Business Division that still lives on today in Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (which I'm an employee of).

It's a good thing Ethernet "won" that non-existing race, because switched networks make CSMA/CD completely unnecessary, while Token Ring would have been quite the liability in the long-run. Frame queues are just a lot more efficient in pushing through data, and even allow for QoS considerations.

Loved 16 Mbs Token Ring - used it for performance testing at IBM. Repeatability and reliability was key

I think you oversimplified the CSMA/CD collision detection slightly on the coaxial cable. It's such a crazy simple and interesting design that it deserves some appreciation, I think. It's not about sensing that there's not the data you sent on the cable, it's much more interesting than that. 10Base ethernet signal is manchester coded, so it's very clearly an AC signal, but when there's another transmitter on the same wire, the interference causes drift on the DC component and the receiver detects this out-of-normal voltage (yes, voltage) on the bus. This also sets the minimum ethernet packet length: each ethernet packet transmitted on a 10Base5 cable must be long enough that it occupies twice the whole length of the wire when transmitted from the far end. This ensures that every node on the bus sees the collision and there's no ambiguity where some nodes would consider that a packet was sent correctly and others would consider it to be a collision. This was later emphasized by requiring each node to signal a collision on the bus when it sees one. This guarantees that the packet is crapified everywhere and a retransmission is then expected and attempted. CSMA/CD ethernet is a fascinating system - no acknowledges, no arbitration, no flow control, just conditioning of electrical waveforms. So very 1970's.

My first job out of undergrad was with IBM working on the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. We were doing everything on AS400, OS/2 on PCs and Token Ring. During the games I was assigned to the aquatics center. So the 2nd week of the games, I'm monitoring stuff during one of the Platform Diving events in the evening. I suddenly get a call on the radio from the scorekeeping room saying that they lost connectivity to the scoreboard, in fact between all 7 computers used to enter scoring data, run the scoreboard and other things (I forget all the functions being done). Hmm. Weird... I run to the network closet, open it and just as I look at the MAU, I get a call on the cell phone from the TOC (Operations center downtown) saying that they've lost the entire Olympics Network! I look at the MAU and it's flashing E6 E6 E6 over and over... I figure "What's the worse that can happen at this point???" I power cycle it, wait 30 seconds and get another call on the radio from the scorekeeping room saying things were working again. I grab the phone, tell the person on the line from the TOC to reboot all their MAUs network-wide. The next morning I get in and get a phone call from the head of ACOG, the head IBM person for ACOG and my boss. They asked what happened, I told them the long version of above... They told me that I basically saved the network and thanked me! During the games, IBM sent a LOT of their employees to "help out" those of us who were working it for the prior 2+ years, but with almost no training or real assignment based on skills. Apparently one of these volunteers had plugged in a piece of network diagnostic gear into the network at the TOC that hadn't been tested on the network beforehand. It started spitting out bad data packets which hosed up the MAUs. That was (thankfully) my last experience with Token Ring... The connectors on TR were HUGE - like 4x in each direction the size of a Ethernet RJ45 plug. The cables were also super thick and bulky.

When Token Ring was the Betamax of Networking Token Bus ( 802.4) was the Video 2000 of Networking

One of my previous jobs had token ring for their entire administration office site (like a dozen buildings and a few hundred employees) till about the mid-2000's. Meanwhile the hundreds of other sites had ethernet and we had already upgraded many from 10 to 100 and then 100 to gbe. One really funny part with the boards reluctance to upgrade HQ is that the PCI token ring NICs were like $800-1200 each and were easily installed 300+ new PCs there in just a couple years and the cost of just the NICs could have more than paid for a entire gbe install. Instead they spent even more money to split rings in to even smaller rings with their own ethernet backhaul. I think we ended up where a single small dept would have 1-3 rings, a whole building might have 5-10, the intranet would still be slow AF.

My first employer had 16Mb/s token ring network. It was superior to ethernet at the time but it was the development of affordable switches that swung the needle towards ethernet and 100Mb versions of this in particular. We did look at a token ring switch too - but they didn't really offer anything better and were more expensive so eventually we moved to Ethernet. We operated a FDDI network too (joining the token ring networks together across a metropolitan area - this was 1Gb/s and was pretty good. We even deployed FDDI interfaces on key servers so that they could sit directly on the high speed network. The key technology is switching which resolves the collision problem that all shared access topology networks had - switching essentially gives each node a point to point connection with addressable frames - the improvements you can get now are just limited to bandwidth and latency.

At the college I worked at we initially used token ring - our (idiot) boss was a big IBM fan. The MAU boxes were not intelligent - they were just a bunch of latching relays that would insert a node onto the ring when the PC TR adapter initialised. Only good thing was they were passive and didn't have a power supply. Problem was it wouldn't always detatch from the ring and bypass the socketi n some circumstances. The MAUs came with a small plug-in device with a PP3 battery inside, which you could plug into each port in turn to reset the port's relay. ISTR the cable was horribly stiff solid-core stuff, which was terminated into the wierd square plugs with IDC contacts, piercing the cable insulation when assembled. I think the plugs were hermaphroditic - they would plug into each other. I recall getting some of the Madge cards, which were a lot cheaper than IBM, but it wasn't long before it got replaced with Novell NE2000s and later, NE2000 clones ( one of the more dubious of which set the MAC address via DIP switches, repeating the same 8 switch bits across multiple bytes!)

I have just read a 90’s PC Magazine article comparing networks and here you are with Token Ring. Love reading about the incompatible late 80’s and early 90’s protocols, apps and file formats and the expensive single purpose software solutions that were for sale to remedy this. The PC frontier was wild.

Who else finds the music distracting from the great content?

A bit over 10 years ago as I was finishing up my studies, there was a "technology incubator" company in my town. They'd have cheap offices for tech start-ups. Said technology incubator had its entire building hooked up with Token Ring. It was kinda hilarious.

You missed IEE 802.4, Token Bus. Token bus worked on a standard ethernet backbone but created a logical ring. Token bus solved the problems of token ring, and did not require a physical ring. The reason it did not get used was that it came out in 1989 when the ethernet people were solving the large network problem in a way that was less expensive than token bus, with the advent of the bridge and the later switch.

So many years spent wiring up banks & insurance companies with Token Ring. 😄

What seems like a lifetime ago in the early 1990s, I encountered a token ring network at an insurance company I worked at. A short time later, they upgraded to ethernet and a Novell network when their IBM mainframe was outsourced then that operation was terminated shortly afterwards a short time later. Around the same time, I also worked with a thin-net network. My family's graphics business went from a Varityper Epics 20/20 typsetter to desktop publishing which output to an imagesetter. The RIP (Raster Image Processor) PC utilized a 3c509 NIC with a BNC connector and I configured their thin-net network. This was slow and reliable until a building tenant decided to put a file cabinet on top of a network in the shared office space. That crushed the cable and brought the whole network down! Then of course nearly a decade later in 2000, I configured a 10/100 ethernet network with those really reliable 3-com 3300 24-port switches. My manager allowed me to take some home and one the 3300s is still in operation today more than two decades later. The 100 Base/T network may be a bit slow but for the few of us on the network, it suffices for watching videos, printing and file sharing.

When you showed the MAU unit, my first thought was: Wow, IBM could have invented the switch right there and then! They could have moved token management responsibility from the nodes to the MAU, and be done with lost tokens and elections. The implementation could also be backwards compatible: just pass a token on each port, so cards that still thought they were on an actual shared circuit would continue to function. Newer cards would be implemented to negotiate with the MAU to do away with the token altogether. At the most extreme, the MAU could bridge Token Ring and Ethernet seamlessly, allowing for a transparent heterogeneous network, and the nodes would be none the wiser, while network engineers would be able to migrate from one technology to the other at their own leisure. Hindsight and all that :P

The B-roll with the dancers and the boombox had me LOL every time!

Any time someone mentioned a "ring" in the context of a network to me I always just automatically thought of a ring topology, and since it rarely came up I never really thought much of it. Until I was assisting our head developer with a problem and while chatting I somehow got him on the whole tangent of Token Ring and how it was so much better. This same gentleman worked at IBM for like 18 years right out of Uni so I guess I now understand why he had an even more vested interest in the tech. Very interesting stuff regardless, though.

Nice video, thank you! I also had a small TR network at home, as I was given some used TR hardware for free in the late 90s :-) But as I bought a PowerBook G4 and I couldn't use my PCMCIA TR card with it (no drivers for OSX...), I also switched to Ethernet. Btw, FDDI also used the Token passing technology, AFAIR. That could be a followup video? :-)

Scary thought, I think I have a Token Ring PCI card in a box still somewhere. Fun fact, up to the early 2000s, Unichem used Token Ring. A common theme amongst companies that had suckled on the IBM AS/400 and S36 offerings and rolled on with them. When you have to set up SNA on AIX over token ring, over a leased line to an AS/400, you know you have landed in hell.

Man, Sega really did go all in on their Daytona Usa arcade boards. They not only used token-ring networks, but token-ring networks using TOSLINK cables.

Heh, I worked at IBM at the time, but for my home network I never moved beyond 16mbit token ring, and indeed went 100mbit ethernet. The real game changer in this was affordable ethernet switches. Once those existed, there were few reasons left for token ring.

My first job in 1996 was on a TR network with an AS/400 and a Novell Netware server- I remember endless piles of 50 ohm coax cable being everywhere.

I was in hospital during a power failure. Bedside TV and phones shut down. When power returned, every station tried to network reboot simultaneously, which took more than an hour.

I started my IT career around 1997, and 10base2 using coax and bnc connectors was on its way out. Once I really got into it around 2001, 100mb Ethernet with 1Gb interconnects was really the standard. I suppose I'm surprised that apart from specific use cases, we've not seen too many advancements in speed, particularly in Soho environments, where 1Gb to the desk and maybe 10Gb uplinks seem to be the norm. In fact, we're moving away from wires to the end point and switching to wifi.

Fantastic video that took me back in time - Hermaphrodite connectors, FDDI, Cambridge Slotted Ring,... Surprised you didn't also bring up the long running court cases over royalties with Mr Olaf Soderblom, helping to keep innovators out and costs high. Thank you!

Migrated a few companies from TR to Ethernet in 1999/2000. Once the first NetWare server went in the TR usually came out soon after. Doesn't feel that long ago and now I feel old. Madge branded hardware always made me think of Neighbours with Madge and Harold bishop 😂

I worked with Token Ring at the end of the 80’s, we used a system from Nine Tiles on the British Rail IECC signalling system. Many jokes about the token falling out when the quite fragile single core wires broke in our test and development environment…

Nice walk down memory lane! In the late 90s some people thought ATM would take over the world. Fortunately it never happened - it was a terrible idea from the start. 😅And there was the FDDI standard which was basically token ring with two rings over fibre. It saw some success in campus networks and Internet exchanges in the mid-late 90s. I believe gigabit ethernet still implements CSMA/CD so theoretically it should be possible to have a gigabit hub. I've never seen one though.

I worked in networking and servers through the 90's, it was a crazy, I had to know Ethernet, ARCnet and token ring and all the protocols like IPX, TCP and NetBEUI and all the OS'es like 20 different versions of Unix, Dos/windows, OS/2 & WARP, Novell, MacOS and all the various platforms and architectures they ran on, and some clients would have a Unix server, an NT server or LANtastic and a NetWare server all in the same company with SGi, SUN, IBM/PS machines and PCs and mac workstations and you were just expected to know everything about all of this, and get them all working together and speaking on the same network, and building bridges and routers with Linux was pretty much the only solution in most cases. I worked on a lot of Token Ring networks at banks, they mostly ran OS/2 on IBM PS/2 machines and they were the worst when it came to cabling.

It would have been nice to here a little bit about bus vs star vs ring topologies. Obviously strengths or perhaps design luck of the star topology played to development / success of the Ethernet switch. You kind of touched on it, but a mention of bus top. was missed and some may be interested to learn about those differences. Maybe diagrammatic aids could have shown it. Great content BTW.

I was a network engineer that had been directed to get a large Token Ring network installed and up and running for our agency with offices scattered on multiple floors of two towers in an office building we were in in the early 1980s. Then right at the end of that decade I was told that we had to change everything to Ethernet in about four months -- with minimal work disruptions and limited amounts of overtime or off hours work. By installing Ethernet switches in the wiring closets along side the existing MAU's and using two types of BALUNS we were able to move the PC workstations to Ethernet over the IBM type 2 Cable then when the new cabling was installed switch almost immediately over to it and all Ethernet. Although I didn't have to do much of the physical work I was able to get pretty good at installing either an IBM hermaphrodite Token Ring connector and if necessary an RJ-45. I worked on Ethernet stuff for the rest of my career and I liked it much better than the Token Ring network especially since it was a lot easier to identify, isolate and replace a faulty Network Interface Card. As some of the previous comments have said there were cases where the Token Ring network was technically better, but as the speed of Ethernet increased that became almost moot. One other thing about Ethernet... A similar, but not exactly the same, types of protocols were used in the late 1960s through the mid 1970s to monitor sensors that the USAF had planted along the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos during the Vietnam war. I know, because I was there and worked on that system.

Awsome video, thx for bringing back memories. Additional note: The original TR connectors are one of the very few hermaphroditic connectors that allows every cable to be used as an extension. Also iirc some of the contacts are ment to switch on a relay to break up the ring for pretty dumb MAU designs.

Token ring was a pain - we had Madge and IBM can we kept getting broken rings (unpleasant) - it got so bad we ripped the whole companies out over a few weekend and replaced with 3com Ethernet. No idea what caused it even happened on dumb maus cables locally between 2 pcs . Glad to see the back of it

ArcNet over Cat 3 twisted pair was a thing. Spent many days troubleshooting a 40 person LAN in the early 90’s. What doesn’t kill you makes you strong.

I worked at IBM in the Thinkpad department in the early 2000s. IBM was famous at the time for hanging on to every bit of technology it had invented. They were still using servers running on Warp OS, and the OS was still being developed internally. We were still using Token Ring at the Research Triangle Park location. In the Thinkpad department, we used those 16mbs PCMCIA token ring cards. As a general rule, the network was pretty stable and reliable. We would regularly ship large Windows software packages from our lab to the laptop manufacturing storage servers dubbed Area 51 using Token Ring. That is, until a few of my coworkers decided to play a lan game of Worms during a slow period. That would have been fine with TCP/IP, but they chose to use IPX/SPX. The combination of token ring and IPX/SPX broadcasts from a few machines brought our network down pretty quickly,. Halfway through the game, one of our IT guys walked in and asked if anyone had any big file transfers going, because most of the token ring network was at a standstill and no one could access Area 51. My coworkers quickly quit their game of Worms, and the network came back up shortly afterwards.

I worked for IBM from the mid-80’s in the team that installed and maintained the internal IBM networks in Europe, IBM had sites with 1000+ nodes on token ring mostly bridged networks, some of these rings were huge, cabinets full of mau’s clicking like crazy! We went on to install ATM backbone routers with tr and Ethernet cards, and intelligent token ring hubs with 100mb uplinks, before swapping the TR hubs out for ethernet, and using ethernet/TR bridges to keep the old TR devices alive for many years, into the 2000’s. That MAU/ATM/TR/Ethernet upgrade program took me all over Europe.

Brilliant video! Not so many years ago, I was teaching this stuff to technical high school students. It also seems we attended the same University! And yes, I remember the NFS boot disks...

Was keen to watch this but the background visuals and music are too distracting

What a blast from the past. I worked with a lot of Token Ring in the 90s, it was pretty common in Australia. The last-gasp I was given to implement was 155Mbps ATM LANE Token Ring running into a Windows NT Server running MPR also plugged into the Ethernet network. The core devices were a pair of Bay networks Centillion 100 chassis. Super clunky and expensive. Fortunately we were given a new budget and transitioned everything to 100Mbps Ethernet with the servers on GbE.

I tend to multitask working, listening to music and learning something on youtube. Having the information in this video be presented without background music would have suited this habit a lot better.

Another great video from RetroBytes, now officially my favorite tech channel - only you didn't say PCBway correctly, still need's the upwards inflection

I worked in a Token Ring shop in the early/mid '90s. It was certainly... an experience.

I am glad you showed those terrible early Token ring cables - not only were the connectors huge, and always right-angled, but the cable was stiff and springy with a lousy bend radius!

I remember back in the early nineties my company was running token ring (we were an IBM shop) and had rings on each of 12 floors all tied to a server ring. One night the ring on the legal floor began beaconing. I cannot recall how we determined which card was the culprit but we did and unplugged it. Our euphoria of quickly fixing the problem was short lived as the computer plugged into the next port on the MAU began to beacon.... To make a long story short, we ended up unplugging every computer on the floor (around 60) disconnecting all of the MAU's from each other and then using the initiation tool (yes, there was a special tool you had to initialize each port on the MAU before using it) we reinitialized every port on the 8 MAU's on the floor. Having done this, reconnecting everything and restarting all of the computers, the ring again worked. We never were able to figure out the root cause. We just chalked it up to bad "juju."

I remember in 1993 my workplace replaced our simple ring Ethernet network with one long cable per device threaded through the ceiling and down into a network closet. So the multiport switch hardware must've existed even that early.

You never covered the reasons it became known as "Broken Ring". The biggest one was MAU failures, when a MAU failed you would have to go and reboot each MAU and wait for a new token to be generated, until you found the one with the issue. The next big issue was the Type 1 connectors, they were easily broken and would sometimes not close when they were unplugged. If this happened you would have to go and inspect every connection on the ring or unplug everyone from the MAUs and then plug them back in one at a time until you found the faulty cable.

When I moved into a dorm at Carnegie Mellon in 1994, they had token ring physical layer connectors. Huge weird IBM connectors. You had to get the ports in your dorm room activated. You could choose between Token Ring, 10BaseT Ethernet, LocalTalk (230.4kbps Apple proprietary) or RS-232 serial. You could literally plug a terminal into your dorm port. 10BaseT required a balun - balanced/unbalanced transformer adapter. LocalTalk cables were much cheaper. A year or two after I got there, they removed Token Ring. They had a trade in program where you could swap your token ring card for an Ethernet one. Moving away from the dorms back then meant getting dial up at 56k or so. Definitely worth staying in the dorms.

I'm not sure that I would agree that Token Ring was designed to solve the problems associated with Ethernet, they were two solutions to network that were developed more or less at the same time. Token Ring to a certain extent is a typical IBM solution to a problem, logical and safe. Ethernet is a lot more radical because the collision problem is an obvious downside, but lets face it, the collision problem was resolved on day one and for large networks improved on very quickly so it was never really a problem. The way I had the difference explained to me in the early 90s was that if you had twenty people sitting around the table at a dinner party, token ring would be that going round clockwise, everyone took turns speaking, whereas with Ethernet, people spoke when they had something to say, and if two people spoke at the same time they would apologise and try again. For me, one just felt more "real" than the other and I came to appreciate the simplicity that cabling an office to use ethernet was over that required for Token Ring. So I am not sure Token Ring was the Betamax, because Betamax was in many ways the superior technology to VHS. Ethernet dominated because it is technically superb.

I like the CAN-bus implementation of multiple access. The devices pull a line low to represent a 1 and leave it to represent a 0. Once the last packet is sent, any device is free to start transmitting. This means multiple devices transmit on the same line at the same time. The instant a device tries to transmit a 0 but detects the line was pulled down to transmit a 1, it stops transmitting and lets the device transmitting a 1 continue. This means there are never any collisions and the implementation is super simple.

Back in 1995 I worked at a small company that had about 10 employees on site. Of the ten, only 8 had computers with six on the network. I have no idea we had a network since four of us were in the field 80-90% of the time. So the two people on the network, that worked in separate offices side by side in a 2000 square foot building. The only reason we had it was because we had a super “techie” Guy that could convince the boss to buy stuff. We did have a laser printer but it wasn’t shared on the network. If you wanted to print anything you used “sneaker net” to move the file to be printed via a floppy disk.

A lot of IBM sites were using Token Ring until the mid 00s (when I left Big Blue) Prior to that I'd worked on a site that had Novell (the package type Novell warned you on the courses not to use) over Token Ring. No clue if they ever bit the bullet and went to TCP/IP over ethernet (they were mooting it back when I left in 1998). I know the chap who designed their Token Ring network died in the mid 00s, having been made, and they couldn't pay me enough to go back there, so I don't know its final fate.

I seem to remember that you had to "energize" the token ring port before you plugged a new computer into it....

I had a job back in the 90's for a large department store holding company. The had an IBM mainframe room which did all the transactions for all the POS terminals for around 500+ department stores. I worked in the real estate division. We were charged with developing malls, new department stores, renovations etc.. Because of IBM it was wired with Token Ring even though our division ran off a Novell network. The Token Ring hub was made by 3COM. Came in one morning, and the hub had failed. There was an acrid smell in my computer room, so I figured the power supply had died. We had a terrible time finding _any_ company by that time who still made token ring hubs. The cabling was coax with BNC T shape connectors. We finally did manage to find a hub and swapped it out. Meanwhile the department was dead in the water.

During the late 1990s/early 2000s I was sys admin for a system that used token-ring to support an OpenVMS cluster in which 3 work-horse application CPUs talked to two servers acting as disk managers. We got it because it was massively faster than the Ethernet we had available at the time. We had TWIN token rings, counter-rotating, which meant we could reach 2x the normal bandwidth of the Ethernet at the same bit rate. Had we NOT used the counter-rotating twin rings but ran them as con-rotating (same direction), we would have about 1.4x the Ethernet bandwidth. If we had used Ethernet as-such, collisions would have had about 0.35 of the token bandwidth. The really nice part was that we could endure a system failure because there were TWO paths to every member. The CPUs were DEC/COMPAQ Alphas. Darned things ran circles around everything else in the site. Our applications started to run so fast that our customers wondered if something was broken. But no, everything ran about 30x faster. Not 30%. 30x! When we switched to Gigabit ethernet and fiber-channel disk connectivity, we eventually upgraded to more traditional non-ring configurations... but for a while our token ring was outrunning other systems like Secretariat at the Belmont Stakes.

I found the background music on this video to be very distracting, particularly the vocal parts.

Would be a great, informative video...... if the background music was not so loud.

Betamax is apt. By the late 90s, VHS had continued to evolve and absorb new improvements. If you compared Betamax to VHS by that time, VHS would often come out looking better. Likewise, when Ethernet had switches, it took away its biggest problem, and there was no reason to bother with Token Ring anymore.

Great video on TR! My 1st introduction to TR was back in the late 90s, when I had to replace it with Ethernet. The MAUs in the closet were massive and took up so much space and that cabling… WOW! Fun fact: Kalpana invented many of the LAN technologies we still use 34 years later like Etherchannel/LAG/Port-channel and VLANs. Their product evolved into the Cisco Catalyst 3000 series. Good times!

Excellent explained and very loud unnecessary music and very fast distracting images.

Nice video, but I couldn't watch past the 12th minute. The background music is too loud and too annoying and the visuals are too 'busy' and distracting. I really liked the subject and actual content but the background music and visuals are way too distracting. Sorry.

The stock video of 'network technicians' is gloriously hilarious the more you watch lol!

I was the "network guy" back in those days which usually meant Ethernet (10Base-5, 10Base-2, 10Base-T) but occasionally Token Ring would pop up, especially near the IBM mainframe. Strangely I understood it because we once used Paradyne terminals on the IBM mainframe. The Paradynes were configured in a bidirectional ring and used a token passing protocol, complete with a "beacon" alert if one direction failed. I don't remember the data rate but it was much lower than 4Mbps, they were character displays. Later I remember FDDI using bidirectional fiber rings, it wasn't a "token ring" though. The speed was 100Mbps so FDDI was made quickly obsolete by cheaper 100Mbps Ethernet.

The background is giving me a migraine.

Please no more the same dixie music in your videos ...

When I started my first programming job in 2007 we had a few legacy token ring machines connected to the larger network with one of those bridges. Also an Ethernet machine that used BNC connectors. Fun times.

I had totally forgotten about Token Ring. The last time I used that was back in '91, when we were implementing a production control system for a highly automated injection molding factory. The system was running on a cluster of about a dozen 386 machines with IBM ARCTIC cards, using OS/2. These machines were connected among each other, and to a IBM mainframe using 16MB Token Ring, even using optical fibre for some of the longer connections (IIRC). The ARCTIC cards were basically 80186 machines on a card, with 512KB of memory and 8 serial ports, running a proprietary real-time OS. These cards were handling the communication to the machines on the plant floor, while the software running on the OS/2 implemented the business logic.

Nice video, thanks. It explains much of what was developing in my early years of discovering pcs and networking.

I headed networking at a major UK university in the mid 80s-90s. We had to use EU procurement rules, and IBM tried their hardest to circumvent our Operation Requirement. They wanted to offer IBM Token ring in buildings (they didn't try to question our requirement for FDDI in the core) and argued that their TR gave better goodput. I had done some research into our major likely network usage, which was file serving, and did some practical research that showed that the damaging random factor of Ethernet was eliminated by file serving. A problem with TR's such as FDDI was purging token fragments. I discovered that different manufacturers were interpreting the standard in different ways, resulting in remnants circulating and building up and clogging the ring (and there is nothing worse than your ring being clogged). This was solved, otherwise interworking would have been impossible. Another problem I discovered with 10baseT was the circuit used in a major manufacturers standard circuit for their chip - it was out of legal spec for link test pulses. It resulted in a change that meant that tens of thousands of ethernet components had to be modified. I always rather liked DQDB - but that's a different story.

Awesome review! I had a customer in 1999 who had mixed 4 and 16, ran HP-UX and AIX servers (I was reviewing their Y2K Lotus Notes system) and a global Novell NDS. So cool at the time! Only time I got in contact with TokenRing. I remember Byte Magazine in 90s ran an article with the calculations for ring size. I look for it in my collection….

When I was in college in the early '90s, we talked a lot about Token Ring and a lot of other fancy network configurations in some of my classes. One day, in class, we talked a little bit about Ethernet. The point in this class is that even though you could get more efficiency from these fancy network designs, Ethernet was going to win out because of its simplicity. It was so simple that it was barely worth talking about in a graduate level computer engineering class.

Going deep on the history of networking but still very understandable. I’m swatting up on networking for a new job at present and this video was so helpful, it’s great to get the context of the development, standards and terms used. Thanks so much! More like this please! Subscibed!

This was an excellent video! I used to teach token ring many many moons ago and this really took me back. Just fun stuff, thanks for taking the time to put it out there

13:32 that PCMCIA card brings back so many memories. that driver was fiddly AF. :D

Your videos fluctuate alarmingly between the history of my childhood and my career. Christ, but i feel old.

There were also managed multiport Ethernet repeaters with 10base2 Coax cables. I remember the DEChub 90 modular series, which also was fully managed and you could read out the stats via SNMP. When I was a student in the 1990s, there were lots of them in use in our University as the twisted-pair cabling was still in the planning phase but Ethernet connectivity was needed everywhere and as "emergency measure" we installed them and Cheapernet cabling. It was always segmented to a few rooms so cabling issues usually did not disconnect everyone.

Great video. I always saw token ring mentioned even on windows but never saw one implemented and I did saw vnc coaxial networks before the r45 took the market.

Wow! I've been reading about computers for almost 30 years and never even heard of the term. Thanks for this excellent piece of IT history!

Great video and very well explained. I worked for IBM New Zealand back in the 80's and 90's and was heavily involved with Token-Ring. I even had buttons made to be given out at trade shows... "IBM Token Ring. Where no LAN has gone before" (Yes, I am a Star Trek fan.)

For the records: The "T" at the end of "10Base-T" technically does NOT denote the type of connector at the end of the cable, but rather the cable itself, with "T" indicating "Twisted Pair" - as opposed to coaxial.

Made my day Mr. Bytes! This is so endlessly fascinating:)

criminally underrate channel. what a treat. thank you

When I started working for the University System in 2000, we still had computer labs on both hubs and token ring switches. One of my first jobs was to move them all over to Ethernet switches. I also recall we had a now dead piece of core networking gear in an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch in the mix between buildings.

The writing was on the wall in the early 90s even before 100Mbps Ethernet. Every small/medium business and school was deploying a network and it was all 10-baseT by then. As a kid I helped my dad install a bunch of those networks. The volume just blew corporate networks out of the water. Those economics made switches cheap enough (with line rate ASICs) that the 100-base standard was able to make them a requirement. It made fixing network problems easy too - hubs started including switched uplink ports for free so collision domains were already limited to 8-16 machines. Token ring was dead in 1992 and only people with vested interests ever pretended otherwise.

I worked at an institution that implemented a 6-port Kalpana EtherSwitch. It was amazing how much faster it was than the series of bridges it replaced.

Back in 2007 I worked for a company who had nearly every flavour of ethernet in use at least somewhere! My machine in my office was connected via 100baseTx to the more recent swich that then had a 1000baseT uplink to other switches and the file server... But there was also a 10base2 outlet by my desk (with just a short loop cable attached to keep the network running) In the hall outside where the switch I was connected to was located there was also the bridge for the 10base2 network segment which the laser printer a couple of rooms away was connected to... There was also a length of RG8 10base5 cable with an end connector bridge and dummy load that was patched into the 10base2 bridge... Follow that down the hall and there was a vampire tap or 3 that connected to some old Sun servers still in use in one of the labs. But as there was no cat5 cabling in this room the modern PC in this lab was connected to an old 5 port 10baseT hub with a 10base2 uplink that was connected to a media adapter with a short bit of coax to the 10base5 downlink connector to the vampire tap..... If you wanted to send a packet to the other building then from the 100baseTx swich there was a media adapter to 10baseFL that then went to the other building where it was distributed with a 10base2 bus with a 8 port 10baseT hub on the end of each row of desks!! I don't think I have ever seen a more complicated network installation anywhere but it had clearly grown organically as new technology was added without the old every being removed!

Love the background music. It's upbeat and conveys the relentless march of time. I feel sorry for those who can't concentrate without absolute silence. Who else digs that 2/2 ragtime that sounds so cheery and bright?

I can remember at primary school when we had whole miss match of networking crap. The office was using token ring. The library was using ethernet over coax cable clipped around the wall for the search and borrowing machines. Then because the school was mostly mac for the students there was various collections of ethernet and old school apple talk with all manner of random cabling. And many classrooms were just not networked at all. In the late 90s there was a rather bad few lighting storms that destroyed bunch of the hubs and many old computers and that too. The school took it as an excuse to upgrade everything to one unified ethernet network. With the office still being its own self contained network. (I imagine some insurance money played a big part in this too)

thank you very much for making this video! I never really had much experience with token ring, although it was one of those technologies that just kind of hung around in the wings for years and years.