22 Jul
2003
22 Jul
'03
11:19 a.m.
I worked for a now defunct web company (aren't they all :) which did a lot
of work for a large car company. They dumped their former web hosting
conglomerate (amazingly still in business) for IBM. One of our IT guys had
to go down to make sure the web site we were programming would install onto
IBM's application servers, so he had to go down to their gigantic server
farm in, I think, North Carolina. They told him to bring a token ring card,
cause *everything* at the server farm was token ring. Wanna take a guess how
much an IBM branded PCMCIA gigabit-token ring card goes for? :)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred N. van Kempen" <waltje(a)pdp11.nl>
To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 2:20 AM
Subject: Re: Token ring (UK)
On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 ghldbrd(a)ccp.com wrote:
I have a box full of token-ring adapters, IBM new
in the box, and can't
find a nibble here in the States. I've been told that token ring
netowrking is an IBM only system, and requies an IBM server to play.
Nah.
Although they ended up being the only ones still holding on to
it, TR was, at one point, a fairly widely-used topology, especially
in areas where network delay was an issue. 4Mbps TR was faster than
10Mbps Ethernet, when under heavy load, simply because TR avoids the
collapsing of throughput when the number of collisions goes up (on
Ethernet).
Still.. TR was expensive as hell, and cabling was same. NIC vendors
were not abundant (IBM, Madge, 3Com and Compaq come to mind) so those
were expensive, too.
But... TR was good stuff, just expensive, which eventually made it
exotic...
--f