21 Mar
2000
21 Mar
'00
7:46 a.m.
On Mar 21, 12:09, Mike Ford wrote:
>Perhaps someone can tell me, on list, why no one
on this list has any
>interest in these. Maybe everyone is saving their money for iOpeners
d8^)
I don't have a clue what they are used for.
I don't know either, but I might hazard a guess that they originated in the
days of thick ethernet, when taps were expensive, and had to be fitted at
specific intervals on the thick coax. Then perhaps it might make sense to
connect two devices to one tap/transceiver. I'm just guessing, though.
Now if they'd been the other "gender", so to speak -- ie, if they could be
used to connect one device to two transceivers -- it would be tantamount to
a bridge. Then I could probably use one as a media converter by adding
both a 10base2 and a 10baseT transceiver, and link the 10base2 part of my
home network to the 10baseT part without leaving a power-hungry repeater
running all the time. I don't think they'll do that though. I once tried
it with two transceivers back to back, and just got millions of collisions.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York