[Sunhelp] Sparc question

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Gregory Leblanc wrote:

> How exactly could you manage thicknet?  Even using cat-v, we have some HUGE
> bundles of cables for our wiring plant, in excess of 6-inches in diameter.
> It made sense for our VAX, since it had ethernet to other computers, and
> everybody was expected to be working from one of the 50+ serial ports on it,
> but for anything else???

Remember that with UTP you have cables going from every machine to your
switch/hub, but with 10base5 or 10base2 you only have one cable per
segment.  With a few dozen machines per segment the amount of cable is
much less than with 10baseT.

That was one of the big issues with 10baseT rollouts a few years back. 
The star topology is more maintainable but requires more cable for the
same performance when connected to a hub.  10baseT switches were
fantastically expensive in the early days so most of the performance
advantages to a star topology were unrealized.

Back in "the old days" you would have anywhere from 1 to 10 sections of
10base2 per floor, each of which would plug into a repeater in a wiring
closet and then connect to the central computer room (first using copper,
eventually fiber became commonplace).  Some smaller installations ran coax
all the way and didn't bother with repeaters.  High end setups would use a
FDDI or similar backbone and ethernet bridges to feed each floor. 

-James