[ih] Internet History - from Community to Big Tech?

[George Ross]

> In the long run, yes, but when you've already got a few thousand desks
> on daisy-chained coax, paid for little by little without a central budget,
> recabling the whole site for UTP-5/RJ-45 and a truckload of Cisco boxes
> was a fairly large financial shock.

Yep!  Hence...

> I think a lot of campuses went through the same sequence (yellow cable,
> daisy-chain Cheapernet, UTP-5) in those years. It was the curse of early
> adopters.

... not forgetting the intermediate step where you install cat3 and you use 
the "spare" pairs for a second connection on the same cable, and you run 
the whole lot well over 90m because you're constrained as to where you can 
put the hubbery.  And then you find that while it's fine for 10Mbps you 
can't push it to 100Mbps so you have to rewire it all yet again.

That said, it did solve the problems with dripping bicycles, and folk 
hooking the wiring with their feet, and the hum-loops from contact with the 
heating pipework, and just not being able to make big enough holes in the 
walls to get all of that coax through!
-- 
George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP
University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics,
Appleton Tower, 11 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9LE
Mail: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk   Voice: 0131 650 5147 
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