23 Jan
2018
23 Jan
'18
1:45 p.m.
On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 11:12 AM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Vampire taps. Now there's a blast from the past.
Somewhere around here
I still have my toolbag which still has my tap drill for installing those taps.
I also have a tap drill somewhere, but it was a rescue from a
clean-out. I've never installed any Thicknet... so far.
I did pick up a bit of yellow 10mbit cable at VCF Midwest a couple
years back, and a couple of taps. I wish I had one more to make it
interesting. I do have some of the boxy transceivers but with 10Base2
BNCs on the mounting plate that can also take a vampire tap mounting
plate.
One of my long-term low-priority projects is to mount that Ethernet
segment high up on a wall, display fashion, and have 2-3 stations and
AUI cables hanging down to table height for interconnecting vintage
networking gear. I do have 10BaseT hubs with AUI ports and even one
or two AUI<->Fiber MAUs to make it all interesting.
Something I have that may be of interest here is a small box of
N-connector 50 Ohm terminators. I can't ever imagining needing more
than 2 pair for my entire life, so if anyone wants to swap for vintage
network hardware, let me know. Mostly, I really want one or two of
the clamp-on vampire taps, the kind you could unscrew from the
transceiver (so that you never had to disturb the tap but you could
remove a station).
The last time I knew I was using Etherhose was at the South Pole in
1996 - they had a long run of it before they switched all the building
interconnects to fiber. It's probably still buried there.
-ethan