Ah, yes, 10-base2. We used it at HP in Colorado Springs in the late
'80s.
Our basement 'cluster' is _still_ wired with it. Goes to the troll
under the stairs, the NeXT, some Unixey servers I had a hand in the
design of, etc. And to the Mac 7500, the laser printer (LW Pro 630),
and finally to a small hub that has the twisted stuff on it for the
two newer Macs and the wireless gateway.
Had one office worker who wanted to move her computer and, instead of
removing the BNC Tee from the back and leaving the two cables
connected,
removed both cables. The guys in my (engineering) group running a
diskless
cluster were not amused.
Happened plenty of times at our shop too. This was easily blamable
on the IT bunch who never seemed to get the point about the
desirability of the little plastic snap-over cover that obscured
the two BNC connectors that you generally did _not_ want to remove.
Our installations that had these rarely experienced any problems.
The other huge source of problems was the wretched teflon-coated
wire that was required for use in plenums (fire code). Rather
than just run the few lengths of that pricey grey stuff where it
was required and the regular black cable everywhere else, they
ordered _only_ the teflon wire, which was so slippery that a good
tug would yank it right out of the crimped ferrule. The black
stuff would shred before it would come apart. We had _lots_ of
teflon network outages too.
Using black wire in the offices and labs and having the proper
Tee covers would have eliminated 95% or more of our network
problems, putting it right down to what you'd expect with the
later twisted pair stuff. In other words, 95% of the blame
for our network problems, and the IT staff's work, came from
the indirect incompetence of the IT staff itself. Surprise,
surprise.
The dickless workstation that we had at the time was in fact one
that I designed. It came _that_ close to not having Ethernet at
all as it cost an extra $50 per node and we had been told to
keep cost to a minimum. But a command decision from the CEO
came down, and it turned out to have been a very good decision.
At the time Ethernet was just one of a crowd and not the clear
winner that it later came to be. Twisted pair variations didn't
exist, there was only the talked-about 1Mbps StarLAN (which died
and later mutated into 10-baseT), and Cheapernet (10-base2) _was_
the new kid on the block. Fun times.
-- Jim
