45 μΙηΌ³΅@]ΪΦ~ 2024/07/19 (ΰ) 04:13:21.223 ID:???-186951785331
I donft remember who had the idea originally, but eventually we wondered if we could build a neighbourhood computer network. How would it work? Most of my friends lived within one building, which made things easier, but Programmer Teacher Friend and, more importantly, my 2v2 Starcraft Teammate, lived in another building that was separated by a plaza that was probably 50 meters wide. To further complicate matters, they were at the far end of the building, which would easily add another 50 meters of length.
Could we build a Local Area Network (LAN) that big? At the time, the standard for normal ethernet networks was 10megabits per second over twisted pair CAT4 (I think? Maybe CAT3?) cable. The problem was the maximum length for ethernet cables of that standard was no more than 50 meters. Ethernet cable also, well, looked like ethernet cable, and we didnft want our cables to attract attention from any maintenance personnel. Hubs at the time (you had to pay more for a switch) often supported coaxial cable running in a 10Base-2 configuration plus ethernet. Picture the cable that comes into your TV box: thatfs coaxial cable. The good news was that 10Base-2 had a max distance of roughly 100 meters, and that was just the distance between hubs, so you could run longer if you had a hub acting like a repeater. The tradeoff was speed – 10Base-2 was limited to something like 2 megabits per second, but that was still super fast for games. The better news was that because coax cable looked just like TV cable, we could hide it next to other wiring where no maintenance person would mess with it.