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Vintage Computers Any vintage computer systems, calculators, video games etc., but with an emphasis on 1980s and earlier equipment.

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Old 26th Jan 2023, 2:52 pm   #1
G6Tanuki
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Default Anyone remember using ARCNet?

This was an early "LAN" using coaxial cable and BNC-type connectors but unlike Thinwire it was wired as a star-architecture.

I came across it around 1980-81 when I got a summer vacation-job at a large car dealership; their Parts/Workshop had Datapoint terminals [green-screen, characters-only, keyboard separate from the display on a curly-cable] and dot-matrix printers linked by ARCnet to a computer somewhere else; there were also Microfiche readers. You'd look-up the part on the microfiche, this would then give a part-number which you entered into the Datapoint, which would respond with price and the number in stock; if the customer agreed you transferred it to the BOM [Bill Of Materials] and then moved on to the next part. You'd then print off the order - where the computer had helpfully added in the locations in the stores - and go to collect the parts in a trolley-mounted bin.

The impressive thing about it all was the speed of response; it makes me think the computer where the data was stored must have been on-site rather than the data coming over slow leased-lines from some central location.

Rather impressive - from memory the whole setup was known as DARTS, and operated Europe-wide because if you had to back-order parts it would say they were coming from Belgium, or Germany.
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 3:22 pm   #2
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

At BT we installed a very few separate Arcnet groups, each just a few workstations, but very soon after we switched to NetWare, which remained for many years. I do remember once someone in purchasing decided to save money by buying a shed load of cheap NE1000 clones which it transpired all had exactly the same MAC address
A 10Mbps network was incredibly fast back then - these days you'd complain if your home broadband was that slow!
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 3:35 pm   #3
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

i was one of the last to adopt Broadband, i held on to dialup until almost the last moment and to be honest because of the lack of other dialup users it was pretty quick!
Maybe i imagined it but thats how i saw it , but i diddnt stream much so it may have been a false picture ,but it was fine for me .
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 5:48 pm   #4
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

I don't know if it was ARCNet I saw, but I do remember green-screen computer terminals in use at a Pye/Philips plant in Cambridge in the 1980s which weren't connected by the usual RS232 serial or similar, but by a piece of coax with (I think) BNC connectors. They did seem amazingly fast. An entire screen of data would flash up at the same time, which seemed like magic in a world dominated by terminals in which information would appear character-by-character. I never found out what they were - some Philips special, perhaps. The terminals themselves were made by Philips (they were in the brown colour used on a lot of Philips computing equipment) and were definitely not on a ring, but star-connected to some central magic.

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Old 26th Jan 2023, 5:58 pm   #5
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

As well as ARCnet and Ethernet the other widespread coaxial technology used from the 70s through to today was/is the IBM 3270 Display-Station protocol, which [like ARCNet] ran over 93-Ohm RG62A/U coax and used BNC connectors.

Both ARCNet and IBM3270 used 'star' wiring to hubs/controllers, whereas thinwire-Ethernet used a bus-topology. There were "Ethernet Terminals" and diskless-workstations just to confuse matters....

All could do instantaneous full-screen-refresh.
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 6:06 pm   #6
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

Are you sure it wasn't Cambridge Ring Chris? The University was still using it extensively in the early 80s, and lots of local tech companies were experimenting with it. The token ring enthusiasts were very keen on the concept and reluctant to move to 'chaotic' collision detection technology.
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 6:11 pm   #7
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

There was also the Token Ring networking that Apollo workstations had in that era - can't recall if that was coax or what. It was much faster than ethernet.

They had a load of Apollos down at Philips Semi in Southampton back in the day, they had some nice features but were killed off when HP bought them alas.
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 6:19 pm   #8
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

I saw something similar at the Pirelli factory in Burton on Trent, in the early eighties. A thick coax with t connectors, dropping down to thinner coax. This ran round some parts of the factory to connect up workstations that had bar code readers attached to them. If I recall correctly, they referred to it as Broadband

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Old 26th Jan 2023, 6:21 pm   #9
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

I thought Cambridge Ring ran at T1-type speeds [1.544Mbit/sec] over twisted-pair? [I remember some academic/research people being very enthusiastic about the Cambridge Ring version of the CAMTEC JNT-PAD back in the days when ISO/OSI X-series protocols were being pushed hard, and seeing an implementation at Rutherford Labs back when the Joint Network Team were being set up].
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 6:30 pm   #10
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

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Originally Posted by Aub View Post
I saw something similar at the Pirelli factory in Burton on Trent, in the early eighties. A thick coax with t connectors, dropping down to thinner coax. This ran round some parts of the factory to connect up workstations that had bar code readers attached to them. If I recall correctly, they referred to it as Broadband

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Yes there was a "Thick and thin" Coax 'broadband' networking standard back then, it was a parallel to Thickwire Ethernet, used a lot of technology common to US cable-TV networking, and was pushed quite hard by BICC? They called one version ISOLAN.

There were all sorts of odd physical/logical-layer things then. Synoptics had "Lattisnet" which was a not-quite-Ethernet, there was also ICL and their OSLAN which didn't quite meet the current Ethernet standards but was used a lot to link things like their DRS workstations and ME29 'office minicomputers'.

DEC had DECNet, which again was an Ethernet-style arrangement using annoyingly non-routable protocols. Fine for LANs but you had to encapsulate-and-bridge if you wanted to link the LANs by any sort of significant-distance.

Novell Netware, and again, Banyan VINES [which had a rather interesting distributed-directory/routing system called StreetTalk] also come to mind.

1970s/1990s networking was rather a fun time; you never knew what you'd find when a client suddenly tol you "We have just taken over a business in Oslo and need you to link them to our existing UK network".
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 6:31 pm   #11
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

The original thickwire Ethernet was really a technology to link computers and peripherals in machine rooms. It started to be used with desktop systems, but was very expensive and physically clunky. It only really became viable for desktop use when the thick cable, external transcievers and drop cables were replaced with lots of RG58 and BNC connectors, albeit at the cost of a reduced maximum segment length.

The term 'broadband' described installations where the full bandwidth of the cable was available, as opposed to 'baseband' where the cable was shared with other things like video.
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 6:33 pm   #12
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

What I saw definitely wasn't Cambridge Ring. It was in a Philips factory (erstwhile Pye TVT). Everything that moved, and quite a lot that didn't, had a 12NC part number, and there was no university connection that I ever aware of.

In my day access to the Cambridge Ring was initially only for a chosen few. I remember seeing a box of tricks which connected to it, but it wasn't at that time for general use by the great unwashed body of students. Our entire college had to make do with a 64kbit/sec X.25 line to the rest of the university, and a single JNT-PAD which served all the public computers and a few other places. There was some mechanism by which the college Ethernet got routed on to the same connection, but it was certainly limited to 64kbit/sec until later in my student days when it sped up due to the Cambridge Ring connection becoming available. The PAD lines were obsolescent then, so much so that a quiet word with the computer officer and some "I didn't see you do that" rewiring resulted in a private PAD line straight to my room. Nobody else had one!

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Old 26th Jan 2023, 6:37 pm   #13
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

Quote:
Originally Posted by paulsherwin View Post
The original thickwire Ethernet was really a technology to link computers and peripherals in machine rooms. It started to be used with desktop systems, but was very expensive and physically clunky. It only really became viable for desktop use when the thick cable, external transcievers and drop cables were replaced with lots of RG58 and BNC connectors, albeit at the cost of a reduced maximum segment length.
Actually, reminiscing further about university, I remember the college 10Base2 Ethernet being implemented using self-bridging TAE connectors (as used in Germany for phones) so it was possible to unplug things without disrupting the entire network.

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Old 26th Jan 2023, 6:44 pm   #14
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

A bit of research turns up this academic paper [in German] on the development of the ARCNet based DARTS system I remember.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10...642-68831-7_11

but I'm not prepared to pay £20 for a copy even though I'm semi-fluent in Technische Deutsch.

DARTS stood for "Dealer Application Remote Terminal System"
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 6:45 pm   #15
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

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Originally Posted by paulsherwin View Post
The original thickwire Ethernet was really a technology to link computers and peripherals in machine rooms. It started to be used with desktop systems, but was very expensive and physically clunky. It only really became viable for desktop use when the thick cable, external transcievers and drop cables were replaced with lots of RG58 and BNC connectors, albeit at the cost of a reduced maximum segment length.
The first Sun Workstation I had to install came with thich Ethernet: long fat cable and a vampire tap transceiver. Fortunately the thin version was a lot more compact.
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 6:47 pm   #16
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

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Actually, reminiscing further about university, I remember the college 10Base2 Ethernet being implemented using self-bridging TAE connectors (as used in Germany for phones) so it was possible to unplug things without disrupting the entire network.

Chris
I remember those being used on some UK 10Base2 Ethernet networks too. Oh, and the confusion that arose when someone visiting from Germany plugged their phone into an Ethernet socket and crashed the thinwire.
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 9:17 pm   #17
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

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Originally Posted by electronicskip View Post
i was one of the last to adopt Broadband, i held on to dialup until almost the last moment and to be honest because of the lack of other dialup users it was pretty quick!
Maybe i imagined it but thats how i saw it , but i diddnt stream much so it may have been a false picture ,but it was fine for me .
I think it's a case that webpages have increased a lot in size (especially ones with lots of adverts) since then, so would now be incredible-slow if still on (Max 56kbps) dial-up
- A bit like PC software needing GB's of Memory and GHz multi-core processors.
Compared to what could be achieved in the old days of very-efficient code on simpler microprocessors.
Probably few would try and program in assembler on current x86 processors.
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Old 26th Jan 2023, 9:44 pm   #18
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

Aston character generators were where I first met ARCnet.
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Old 18th Feb 2023, 10:35 am   #19
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Default Re: Anyone remember using ARCNet?

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Originally Posted by ortek_service View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by electronicskip View Post
i was one of the last to adopt Broadband, i held on to dialup until almost the last moment and to be honest because of the lack of other dialup users it was pretty quick!
Maybe i imagined it but thats how i saw it , but i diddnt stream much so it may have been a false picture ,but it was fine for me .
I think it's a case that webpages have increased a lot in size (especially ones with lots of adverts) since then, so would now be incredible-slow if still on (Max 56kbps) dial-up
- A bit like PC software needing GB's of Memory and GHz multi-core processors.
Compared to what could be achieved in the old days of very-efficient code on simpler microprocessors.
Probably few would try and program in assembler on current x86 processors.
I couldn't agree more.. I've been programming for over 40 years and Parkinson's law has always applied. Whenever more processing, memory, comms bandwidth, graphics rendering, DSP etc. become available, applications have grown to fill that capacity and then require more. It's the wheel that keeps the industry going.

The sad thing is that much of this additional capacity is not being used to increase utility or usability, often it's down to sloppy implementation, or to spy on you or sell you things.. Does a driver for an inkjet printer actually need to be 100s of megabytes in size - it does if it's going to track your ink usage and help you find the nearest authorized cartridge reseller in your area when it thinks you are low!
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