[ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?

[George Ross]

> 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.

Going by our (Edinburgh dcs) experience, what came before wasn't really
suitable for serious business roll-out.

Thick yellow cable was hard to install, and then drilling it for vampire
taps took a bit of skill and wasn't easy in an overhead cable basket with a
load of other stuff round about.  And it quickly ran out of bandwidth, and
installing more was a pain.

Thinnet was much easier to install, but rather fragile.  We had our techs
crawling through offices about once a week trying to find the latest fault
caused by feet, dripping bicycles, hum-loops from contact with the
plumbing, and so on.  It was easier to install, but we got to the stage
where we simply had too many separate wires to feed them all through all
offices, and that put constraints on how people could be assigned desks.

UTP was a *major* improvement on all of that.  It was easy to install, much
more robust, and simple to re-patch as folk moved office.  Our hub site
rapidly became a mess of knitting, though, and on more than one occasion we
had to take everything down over a weekend to re-patch neatly from scratch.

Soft-configurable VLANs finally made all of this easy to manage.  Install
and patch once, and almost never have to go back into the IT closets.

(We had to re-install most of our original UTP, though, because it was cat3,
a lot of it was over-length, and because 10baseT was so robust we had
doubled-up ports using the "spare" wires.  But that's another story...)

--
George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP, University of Edinburgh,
School of Informatics, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9AB
Mail: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk   Voice: 0131 650 5147   Fax: 0131 650 6899
PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5  B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A  426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 237 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/attachments/20160901/f1b2c17c/attachment.sig>