Retro networking / WAN communities
Maciej W. Rozycki
macro at orcam.me.uk
Tue Apr 12 13:21:26 CDT 2022
On Mon, 11 Apr 2022, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
> > I think "hub" is another word for "repeater" (just like "switch" is another
> > word for "bridge").
>
> Interesting.
>
> Do you know of any documentation, preferably not marketing materials, that
> used "repeater" in lieu of "hub"?
As I recall back in mid 1990s nobody around at the university used to
call plain 10BASE2 repeaters hubs. We'd only call multiport 10BASE-T
devices hubs (aka concentrators), where each port only serves one device
in a point-to-point topology (i.e. no shared medium such as with 10BASE5
or 10BASE2).
We had a bunch (4 or 5) of IIRC 5-port 10BASE2 repeaters for our network
at our hall of residence. Each 10BASE2 port served ~20 hosts so as not to
exceed 10BASE2's maximum segment length. I'm not sure anymore if the
repeaters had an AUI port; I think they did, but if so, it wasn't used.
They were connected into one network via a bridge, which was an 80286 PC
equipped with a corresponding number of NE2000 clones and running a piece
of DOS software called Kbridge. It was to reduce network congestion,
which often happened anyway when multiple groups of people played
networked (IPX) Doom all at a time.
Also nobody would call a device a switch if it didn't do cut-through.
We'd call devices doing store-and-forward only bridges; after all there's
no actual circuit switching in store-and-forward.
I guess these terms became fuzzier with time as non-techies started
confusing them.
FWIW,
Maciej
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