Thicknet/10base5 Test Segment: The Cable is In!

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 28 Jun 2018 at 20:13, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

>
> The US Electrical Code has not allowed any kind of signal wire in
> the same conduit with any kind of power wiring for as far back as
> I can remember.

Sounds very sensible, but the Isle of Man isn't part of the USA, nor
even part of the UK. It's its own little country and this was the late
1980s. I suspect the Manx Electrical Code or equivalent had no mention
of data cabling at that time. :-)

My employers were still fairly new to this "Ethernet" stuff. In my
next job, I installed a few SAGE MainLAN systems, because Ethernet was
still too expensive. I don't know what the cabling system in MainLAN
was, but it ran at 4Mb/s and IIRC the connectors to the NICs were
DE-9.

I can only find a few ads for it:
https://books.google.cz/books?id=HXDkCoqMiVIC&pg=PP16&lpg=PP16&dq=%22SAGE+MainLAN%22&source=bl&ots=fnPPPF4Hhk&sig=rC_D70XTAU7QipXQed7HBDlS4Yo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwims8Di_PbbAhUPDKwKHUEbBekQ6AEILjAB#v=onepage&q=%22SAGE%20MainLAN%22&f=false

No tech description. The Internet has forgotten about it. :-(

I think it went up against ArtiSoft LANtastic in its ARCnet
incarnation, which I also never saw.

MainLAN was much quicker than the $25 Network, which was rare in the
UK -- I knew of only a single vendor and I never saw it.
http://www.retro.co.za/blog/?p=2539

I believe the $25 Network was similar to Farallon PhoneNet, which I
did work on sometimes -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhoneNet

PhoneNet was original AppleTalk but over US-style telephone cables
with US-style jacks, instead of Apple serial cables, so the cable runs
could be much longer. In the UK we couldn't share cabling with phone
cables, as we use different connectors for telephone lines to the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_telephone_socket

MainLAN was quicker, I think, than PromiseLAN which I also never saw:
https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue142/70_Getting_wired.php

All the proprietary network interconnects were quickly replaced by
Ethernet in my world -- usually 10base-2. A few IBM shops ran Token
Ring but I rarely saw it.

10base-T mostly killed off Token Ring, and 100base-T quickly replaced 10base-T.

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053