[ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 01/09/2016 17:37, Steven Ehrbar wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 9:40 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
> brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I think Token Ring really failed because the IBM Cabling System was
>> too good, and therefore very expensive. The Ethernet discourse (one
>> simple coax cable goes everywhere) was very persuasive, especially
>> when Cheapernet (thin coax) came along.
>>
> 
> I'll agree with the first sentence, disagree with the second.  The
> battlefields the network wars were finally decided on were in the offices
> of businesses, and bus coax Ethernet was awful there.  

Quite right, and those were the arguments for the IBM Cabling System.
But cheap and cheerful won the day in many campuses, before business
even knew that they needed a LAN. As you say, Ethernet only penetrated
business seriously was when UTP came along.

   Brian

> They were far too
> vulnerable to user-induced cabling faults that could take down a network or
> large parts thereof.  What won the war for Ethernet in the office was that
> 10BaseT was native on UTP (and tolerant of bad UTP wiring), while Token
> Ring, while it claimed to work on UTP, really wanted STP to work right.
> Where the office went, volume production followed.
>