Re: "Ethernet is so much better"
Wasn't it Ethernet 10base2 or whatever
Yes indeed.
A brief history of timeethernet for you wippersnappers who've never seen anything older than twisted pair with switches.
Once upon a time, at the Xerox Palo Alto research centre (from where many things we take for granted came - including the mouse, the graphical desktop), they came up with this idea for networking devices. The very first version ran at (IIRC) 4Mbps, but by the time it made it out of the labs it became 10Mbps - and used a thick (1/2" dia) cable that looked a lot like hosepipe. This "thick ethernet" typically had few connections - possibly only one at each end for the terminator - with devices connected via "vampire taps" which were clamped round the cable and had prongs that pierced the insulation to make contact. This cable could be up to 500m long, and the system was known as 10base5 - 10 because it's 10Mbps, base because signalling is baseband, and 5 because it can go to 500m.
Anyone who's worked with it will tell you that 10base5 wasn't the easiest to work with - the cable being thick and not very flexible, and a restriction on where you could put the taps (the cable was marked where they could be put - it's something to do with the wavelength of the signal), and you needed these thick and inconvenient AUI cables (15 pin D connectors) between the tranceiver clamped on the cable and the device. So the cunning engineers came up with a variant using thinner cable - smaller, cheaper, more flexible, using easier to use BNC connectors - which could be taken directly to the device. So now we got the easier to work with but more fault prone "thin ethernet" (or "thinnet", officially 10base2) which cane be up to 185m long (round that up, and you get the 2 in 10base2).
If you needed more than what was doable with a single cable - or wanted a bit more reliability - then you could link multiple segments together with a repeater, or if really deep pockets, a multi-port bridge. Hands up who still remembers the 5-4-3 rule :D
Then the clever bods came up with the idea of using twisted pair cabling and star wiring from a central multi-port repeater (which came to be called a hub) to each device - the 10baseT (T for twisted pair). 10baseT still had many of the issues of the coax networks - still only one collision domain, still swampable by a single faulty node, still the 5-4-3 rule.
As an aside, there was a 10baseVG which used four pairs of Cat3 (voice grade, phone cable, hence the VG) which never caught on.
And over time, we got faster networks (100baseT) and switches (aka multi-port bridges). The latter provided collision domain isolation - allowing A to talk to B while C was talking to D.
And of course, things got faster again, and again, ...
Kids of today, don't know they're born. Cue obligatory Monty Python sketch :D
Biting the hand that feeds IT
