Token Ring, the Betamax of Networking

Comments · 1.1K

• CA

  @CajunInFlorida · 3 years ago (edited)

  TRUE STORY:  Back in the 90s I was on a team involved in converting an aging IBM Token Ring network to all Ethernet at a large company.  When presenting the investment case to leadership, the Corp IT Director said the following to justify the conversion: "We have way too much traffic on the existing token ring network, and congestion is causing some of the tokens to FLY OFF THE RING DUE TO CENTRIFUGAL FORCE!".  Of course an insanely laughable statement, but the leadership folks just nodded and moved forward to approve the large investment.  This absolutely happened.

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• MA

  @markborchers6613 · 3 years ago

  Not forgetting that when assembly line robots were first deployed (like in automobile factories) they all used token ring because it was guaranteed when the data would arrive at the robot. That was important, because if the data was delayed because the network was choked, the car chassis could get crushed, or the robot damaged. Apparently, token ring was unchoke-able. Almost all supermarkets used token ring too, because of the bar code scanners. Again, guaranteed data round trip time, and unchoke-able.

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• BR

  @BritishBeachcomber · 3 years ago

  I was in hospital during a power failure. Bedside TV and phones shut down. When power returned, every station tried to network reboot simultaneously, which took more than an hour.

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• AS

  @Ashinle · 3 years ago

  This channel is stupidly underrated

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• MI

  @mistaecco · 3 years ago

  Working IT in a hospital, my friend and I once spent about 3 hours toner probing to find a jack from a side office. After many many closets, we found a storage room with what we later learned was a token ring patch panel from many many years ago! Our most senior IT person on site got a big smile on his face when we brought one of the RJ45 to Type 1 plugs to him!

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• PY

  @Pymmeh · 3 years ago

  400Gbps currently being deployed and 800Gbps being standardised with router line cards already supporting it. I remember building 64kbps frame-relay circuits for customers (or 128k for the posh ones!) what seemed like not all that long ago. I feel old :(

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• SH

  @SheeplessNW6 · 3 years ago

  Years before token ring, there was another ring technology introduced in the mid-70s, the Cambridge ring. Developed at the University of Cambridge, this became widely used in UK higher education, but I don&apos;t think it had much commercial success outside this sector. It was an example of a &quot;slotted ring&quot;: there was a fixed number of packets continually circulating around the ring, put there by a master station, and each packet had one bit in the header which flagged whether this &quot;slot&quot; was occupied or not. A station which wanted to transmit waited until it received a packet whose flag indicated that it was empty, then stuck its payload in the packet, flipped that flag, and passed the packet on down the ring. The only two vendors I can remember were Camtec and SEEL.<br><br>At <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjLctlmZSp4&amp;t=78">1:18</a> you mention &quot;one thin piece of coax&quot; used for ethernet. We used to call this &quot;thinwire ethernet&quot;, formally &quot;10base2&quot;, but it wasn&apos;t ethernet&apos;s first form. Before 10base2 there was 10base5, and boy was that horrible! The expensive coax cable was nearly 10 mm in diameter, and difficult to bend. Also, you had to be careful not to bend it too tightly, because that would cause signal reflections, killing performance. To attach to it, you literally drilled into the cable, and attached a &quot;vampire tap&quot;, which had a spike which reached the solid core. It was dreadful stuff to work with, so the arrival of thinwire ethernet was very welcome, even though anyone could break a thinwire network by disconnecting the cable from the T-piece at the back of their workstation.

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• BO

  @borisgalos · 3 years ago

  The advantage of that IBM Token Ring connector was that it would short across if it was unplugged so that you didn&apos;t lose the entire ring network if you didn&apos;t have both ends connected at every network location. Without that connector if somebody removed a computer and didn&apos;t connect the in and out ports the ring was broken and everybody lost the network. <br><br>One other advantage the Ethernet gained that helped it was the ability to use the thin &quot;cheapernet&quot; cabling. Originally you had to use a thick cable with a tapped drop line for each network location.

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• TH

  @thomasstets8475 · 3 years ago

  I had totally forgotten about Token Ring. The last time I used that was back in &apos;91, when we were implementing a production control system for a highly automated injection molding factory. The system was running on a cluster of about a dozen 386 machines with IBM ARCTIC cards, using OS/2. These machines were connected among each other, and to a IBM mainframe using 16MB Token Ring, even using optical fibre for some of the longer connections (IIRC). The ARCTIC cards were basically 80186 machines on a card, with 512KB of memory and 8 serial ports, running a proprietary real-time OS. These cards were handling the communication to the machines on the plant floor, while the software running on the OS/2 implemented the business logic.

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• CB

  @cbmsysmobile · 3 years ago

  The worst part of Token Ring was when someone unplugged the cable and the tokens fell out onto the floor.....

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• TA

  @tad2021 · 3 years ago

  One of my previous jobs had token ring for their entire administration office site (like a dozen buildings and a few hundred employees) till about the mid-2000&apos;s. Meanwhile the hundreds of other sites had ethernet and we had already upgraded many from 10 to 100 and then 100 to gbe.<br><br>One really funny part with the boards reluctance to upgrade HQ is that the PCI token ring NICs were like $800-1200 each and were easily installed 300+ new PCs there in just a couple years and the cost of just the NICs could have more than paid for a entire gbe install. Instead they spent even more money to split rings in to even smaller rings with their own ethernet backhaul. I think we ended up where a single small dept would have 1-3 rings, a whole building might have 5-10, the intranet would still be slow AF.

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• DA

  @DarthTrotter · 3 years ago

  So many years spent wiring up banks &amp; insurance companies with Token Ring. 😄

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