My first network was a Corvus OmniNet. It was basically meant for hard drive sharing ... the the "Big" Corvus drive (20Meg - tens of thousands of dollars)) had some four-pin Molex connectorson the back (if you bought that option), the PCs had a NIC with a four-pin Molex connectors on the back....you ran some funky cheap cable from one to the other. If you used Apples (IIs, II Plus') you had to partition that part of the drive into 123K (emulated floppy) segments. That was also when Corvus came out with a backup scheme that used VCRs as a backup. It basically converted the data into video snow, that got saved to VHS tape - worked pretty good too.
Then Orchid came out with "PC Net" (3COM Ethernet was hitting the street about that time too). PCLan was 1 megabit over 75ohm coax. Then came ArcNet - a nightmare, because every card was manually addresses with dip switches (up to 255 nodes per NETWORK). The problem was that the people with the network never wrote down what addresses were in-use, so when you added a station, you pulled an address out of {some dark place that smells bad} and tried it. If the address was already in-use, the entire network crashed (it is a token-Bus topology).
Then I went to IBM Broadband class in Boca .... a year later to Token-Ring Class (mostly structured cabling - IBM Style), then 3COM was starting to pick up serious steam, then (a few years later) folks were looking at "LattisNet" - Ethernet over PHONE WIRE...
I still have a friend that gives me crap about telling the customers ("You're really gonna trust your HIGH-SPEED data to PHONE WIRE? Are you Nuts!! Coax is the only media that can support that kind of speed......." (we didn't sell LattisNet till much later).
Meanwhile, we picked up Novell - a red, breadbox-sized box with (up to) 15 AUI connectors on the front, that'd let you put computers up to 50 Meters away from the server. Then Novell ported the software to be able to run on PCs (well, Xts), but you had to buy a version for the specific network type (ArcNet, PCLAN, 3COM, etc). Next (like, version 2, I think) they made it universal - you made some menu choices during install, and it would compile the OS for your selections (over 20-something 5/14" 360K flooppies).
It worked great, until you wanted to change something ( like receive/transmit buffers....then you'd recompile it again).
At the time there was a huge compitition between Novell and 3COM (who used to make server hardware/software based on MS LANMan) - 3com kept saying "We're faster," Novell said They were, and they were more secure and stable (it was according to tests). 3COM kept going for speed, Novell kept going for security and stability....Novell won, 3COM got out of the Server O/S and Server Hardware business.
Then Novell came out with 3.0. To demonstrate the power, they rolled it out on stage with a 386/33 server, loaded with a whopping 256Meg of RAM( I think), then proceeded to Serve 1000 (one thousand) PCs, all doing I/O to the server box. It was amazing. I'd bet that original 3.0 server could still beat the majority of Microsoft server deployed today .... MS Server O/S still sucks.
I still have a copy of MS DOS 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 2.1 ....6.22 - 'cause, ya never know. I still have an S100 Zenith computer running CP/M 2.2, my original IMSAI 8080 is in some Computer Museum in Boston (donated by the owner/founder of ComputerLand).
The BEST PRINTER EVER CREATED is still a Diablo 630 with a metal Daisy Wheel and film ribbins - it's the classiest output you can generate from a computer. NEC thimble printers were pretty damn decent too. I had one of each, loved 'em both. Try printing 12-part NCR paper on a laser or dot matrix printer....HAH!
You can tell you're dealing with an old Token-Ring guy when they can recite the Dip-switch settings from memory (yet today).
There's not an old Ethernet guy out there that hasn't made the emergency run to Radio Shack to get generic 50 ohm coax and some (if need be) twist-on BNC connectors or "T" adapters (There is a specific coax just for thin -and thick- Ethernet). Sometimes ya just gotta do what ya just gotta do....."Get 'em running ... just fix it."
DEC was the BEST engineered equipment PDP, VAX, Pro series ... even the PCs they made (The "Rainbow")...great stuff, and the best keyboard ever produced.
I've had or played with everything from the Intel MDS8080, IMSAI, Cromemco, Dynabyte, Altair, IBM PCs and S/36, Apple (even um, McIntosh I and Lisa), Compaqs (starting with the 286/6Mhz), the portables, Osbourne, KayPro, HP, Commodore (Pet -->Amiga), ....it's been some kind of ride trying to keep up.
I remember trying to sit through some presentations at 3COM and understand the difference between their bridges (layer two), their routers (Layer 3), the BROUTERS (some kind of integrated critters)......goofy times they were.
Is Retix still around? Killer bridges, nice, easy-to-use routers ... I miss 'em. I remember laughing at Hayes and their "stupid 'AT' " command set ... Novation was the modem-to-have for an Apple II. 300 baud was doing pretty good, 1200 (Bell 212) was awesome..Racal Vadic had the high-end corporate modem market, and Gandalf ran large campus data access systems....
You young whipper-snappers don't know how good you have it - It used to be that you had to manually configure every card for address, IRQ, and DMA ...
Online networks were "The Source" and Compuserve ... I used 'em both. The Source was serious research, Compuserve was more personal-use fluffy stuff. I was on the CB Simulator (now called "chat rooms") as Stretcher Fetcher .... parties all over the country and a good time had by all. I met/knew the first two people that met and got married from talking to each other in the CB Simulator (ChrisDOS and Zebra3 - Z3 was from Chicago).
That's it for me this round .... off to Wisconson for a few days....
FWIW
Scott
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