Thread by @Foone, Where's my bnc cables, it's time to build a LAN It's the [...]

Where& #39;s my bnc cables, it& #39;s time to build a LAN

It& #39;s the 3com EtherLink II!

I& #39;d probably have to dig up an old networking book to figure out 10base2/thinnet. it seems like thing kind of thing that isn& #39;t going to have a ton of info online for it.

although really it& #39;s not super complicated. The tl;dr is that you need BNC-T connectors, BNC between each PC, and terminators on each end.

you don& #39;t have hubs or switches like how 10BASE-T and derivatives have, you just wire it as a big long line of computers.

which has the obvious downside that if the cables from one computer get messed up, you no longer have A network, you have two separate networks for each half

T-connectors are those little T-shaped things.
The terminators are one-sided things you put at either end.
They stop the signal from bouncing off the end of the cable and causing interference.

10Base2 (this kind of networking) was popular early on because it was relatively cheap. Network cards were expensive, sure, but the amount of additional hardware you needed was minimal, and scaled very simply with how many nodes you had online.

this IS Ethernet, btw, just like the ubiquitous kind used today.

Ethernet is the link-level protocol, and it can be carried over multiple physical layer protocols.
The cat5-cable kind we use today is some variation on the 10Base-T sort, T for "twisted pair".

so named because internally it& #39;s an unshielded cable composed of multiple twisted pairs of cable.

twisted pair cabling is used because each pair forms a balanced circuit, and any electrical noise induced into it will be roughly identical in both wires.
Then the receiver can subtract out the common interference, getting only the data.

and it turns out doing it this way works well enough for most conditions and is cheaper and easier to work with than shielding the cable.
(Although you can always shield the cable afterwards, and get the best of both worlds)

this is compared with the 10base2 or thinnet shown in my first post, which uses coaxial cable.
This is the kind of cable used for TV connections, where there& #39;s a center cable, an insulating sheath, then a woven mesh of another connector, then possibly more shielding after that

This is a more complex way to prevent interference on the internal connector, and while it works very well, it results in cables that are more expensive and stiffer, making them hard to route through desks, walls, and under-floor tiles

Ethernet started with neither of these, it started with thicknet.
This was an even thicker cable than standard coax, with the weirdness that you just had one wire for the entire network.
And you might say "foone, isn& #39;t that how 10base2 works, where you design it as a line?"

but no, that& #39;s a set of cable segments which act as one big wire, with connections between them.
10base5 actually WAS one wire, with no breaks in it. And yet you could have more than 2 computers. How?

The answer is "vampire taps".
You attached to the middle of the cable, without cutting it.

Vampire taps are these fun little devices which clamped onto the cable and had a big spike in the middle, which& #39;d stab right through the cable& #39;s insulation and shielding and make contact with the conductor inside.

The connectors to the cable ended up being big and bulking because of this, as they had to make a good connection and couldn& #39;t risk disconnecting as they were moved around.
This also made it annoyingly hard to re-wire your network, as you might expect.

This sort of connection is why you often see those big DB-15 connectors on old network cards, like this one.

that& #39;s Attachment Unit Interface, it& #39;s designed to let you connect onto the vampire tap. They didn& #39;t just build a connection right into the card, because the physical layout of that would be almost impossible.

So instead you& #39;d have a Medium Attachment Unit, which was the device that hooked onto the 10base5 cable itself.

Then you run a cable from that device into your network card.

which made routing this big thick cable much easier, and also made it more resilient.
You could stick the cable and Medium Attachment Unit under a floor tile or behind a wall, then then just run the AUI cable to your computer.

a lot of pictures are from here, which is a neat project to build a 10base5 network in the modern day (2012, at least):
http://tech.mattmillman.com/projects/10base5/">https://tech.mattmillman.com/projects/...

Ethernet was initially developed at Xeroc PARC in the mid 1970s, by several people including Robert Metcalfe.
in 1979 he left Xerox, and formed 3Com, and then he worked with Xerox, DEC, and Intel to promote Ethernet as an open standard, first published in 1980.

Xerox gave up the trademark on "Ethernet" as part of that process (and thank god for that, because the other name was calling it the Digital Intel Xerox standard, or DIX), and it got formalized as IEEE 802.3 in 1983.

Ethernet caught on for a couple reasons, but primarily it seems to have been that:
1. you could buy networking equipment for it from multiple manufacturers, instead of being tied into a specific company& #39;s networking ecosystem
2. it was able to adapt to new physical layers

#2 is important because Ethernet started as thicknet, then moved to thinnet, then has stayed with some variant of 10base-T for decades.

The link level protocols being identical meant it was possible to bridge these physical networks together, making it easy to incrementally upgrade, instead of having to throw out your whole network and start over

10base-T, btw, started as an experiment at AT&T to design a network as a star topology. It was called "StarLAN", appropriately enough.

Different types of networks have to be laid out in different ways.
10base5/thicknet and 10base2/thinnet both use a bus layout, where there& #39;s one primary path that goes through every computer on the network.

10base-t uses a star, where you have a hub/switch that has a 1-to-1 connection to each computer, individually.
This is more reliable because you can& #39;t accidentally take down the whole network by messing up one computer& #39;s connection, but it does require more cable in most cases

plus it now requires a hub or switch, which bus topologies never did.

but bus being cheaper meant it was the choice for a long while, with star-topologies only catching on later once prices had dropped.

And the real benefit of a star is that it& #39;s better for adapting into a tree.
(that& #39;s a weird sentence out of context)

see the nice thing about having your network designed around a star shape, is that you can have multiple stars and then have your switches be smart and route data between them.
you get multiple stars, in other words, without having to wire them all together in one giant bus

which makes it the perfect network design to use as networks grow.
like, say you have a big HQ that& #39;s several floors of a building.
with a bus, you have to wire the cable through all the computers on the first floor, then go up to the second floor, then up to the third floor

and then someone knocks over a computer on the second floor and both the first and third floor networks are cut off from each other. so it& #39;s very fragile, and tricky to wire.

but with a tree topology, or a star-of-stars, you have a star topology for the first floor, then one for the second floor, then one for the third floor, and all of those talk to one big switch somewhere.

so not only is taking out one computer on the second floor not a problem (it only affects them, because it& #39;s a star)
but even if you take out the hub/switch for the whole second floor, it just affects the second floor, not the first or third.

oh, correction! I wasn& #39;t correctly thinking about how this works:
if you were on a bus network and lost a computer on the 2nd floor, the 1st and 3rd floors aren& #39;t simply cut off from each other, they& #39;re cut off from themselves.
remember the terminators?

yeah, the 10base5 and 10base2 network types need terminators at each end of the bus to prevent signal reflection, and when you accidentally break the cable in the middle, there& #39;s no terminator there, so the network is almost certainly useless until fixed.

the other big networking technology elephant in the room has already been hinted at: the ring topology.
Why would you design your network as a ring?

and the answer is Token Ring, an IBM standard and competitor to Ethernet. In this case, the network is designed somewhat like a bus design, except that it loops around at the end.

and the reason it does this is because it uses a token-passing method for channel access.

So, see, any network design (other than maybe a fully switched star network where all connections are 1-1) has a problem: talking over each other.

the network connection is common to all the computers, and basically only one device can talk at once, or the signals get mixed up together.

So for ethernet this is handled with something with the complex name of "Carrier-sense multiple access with collision detection" or CSMA/CD, but it& #39;s really quite simple. It& #39;s very similar to what you do when talking to someone in person, or on the phone.

Latest Threads Unrolled: