Technology :: Networks
in the early morning on Friday, the 1st of February 2008 by Chad
The LAN turns 30, but will it reach 40?
For Ethernet, its designers considered token passing too slow and fragile, Metcalfe said. “We wanted everything to be passive and simple,” he explained. “The token-passing people — and that included IBM Token Ring — said they were deterministic, since you knew the token would be passed around in a certain amount of time. But if you counted the processes that had to be undertaken if the token was lost, it was a lie. I know that sounds nasty, but for 10 years I had to put up with that crap from the IBM Token Ring people — you bet I’m bitter.
Token Ring was horrible. Token Ring was the perfect example of where theory ran straight smack into the heavy brick wall of reality and lost big time.
How many hours have I myself wasted on troubleshooting Token Ring networks when a single node was beaconing? Typically hours. Removing one segment of the network at a time until finally determining which workstation was configured wrong. IBM should stick to the mainframes and leave everything else alone.
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February 2nd, 2008 at 11:00 am
And when the terminator was taken off, and the token fell out, finding that sucker sometimes took DAYS…
I’m still looking where they put the ether into the ethernet, though.
February 2nd, 2008 at 11:02 am
“still looking FOR where they put”
Also still looking for my brain, that should be proofreading before clicking “submit”.
Anybody seen my brain lying around?
February 4th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Finding the dropped tokens and spilled ethernet frames is what we used interns for… ahh, the good ol’ days.
February 6th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
I remember smokin net … or wait, what was I smoking? It’s all just a bad dream.
People that hate Microsoft haven’t had the pleasure of using IBM technology.