Retro networking / WAN communities

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

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