In reply to a post by Pheasant:

At least it helped me with my EE understanding the 'practical' application of signal reflections in waveguides

When I left uni back in the dim and distant I got a job in a government research lab at Aldermaston (yes, the atomic weapons place), so had access to things like fast (for the time) 'scopes, pulse generators etc. So it was easy to set up fairly short (<10 metre) bits of coax etc and watch what happened when you sent sub-nanosecond edges and pulses down them and played with the terminators, couplings, bent/squeezed the cable etc.

Rather like your experience, it put flesh on the bones of the rather dry theoretical lectures on transmission lines and, later on, what TDRs could tell you

In reply to a post by billford:

The first version, 10BASE5

Ah, thick Ethernet and vampire taps... happy days (?)

the first time I used a network at home was coaxial, i had a lodger and needed some way of connecting my computer and her computer to the net the same time, so connected both to a computer in my bedroom with a modem inside using this coaxial network. When we went to ADSL, I just replaced the dial up modem with an Alcatel stingray modem that BT supplied at the time. Sharing dial up was not great

How things have changed, with routers, now wireless can be used, not that i use it for my main computer and anything else I can wire directly I do.
I installed a 10GB/s fibre optic network in a friend's house, super superfast, but what a pain in the neck, i can understand why copper cables have not been replaced.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I installed a 10GB/s fibre optic network in a friend's house, super superfast, but what a pain in the neck, i can understand why copper cables have not been replaced.

I should do a little thread on fibre and on how much that has changed and developed in the last 25 years too.

Incredibly more so than copper LAN cabling in many ways. Not just fibre itself, but much like Moores Law the incredible price drop in “actives”

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I should do a little thread on fibre and on how much that has changed and developed in the last 25 years too.

Incredibly more so than copper LAN cabling in many ways. Not just fibre itself, but much like Moores Law the incredible price drop in “actives”

Even back in the day copper Ethernet was expensive. In 1990 a 10Base2 ISA cards where the thick end of £200 each. The main thing that has changed in fibre is the proliferation of multimode fibre standards, going from OM1 throught to OM5 now. I have long held the view that multimode fibre is something of a mugs game. Sure it's cheaper in the short term but as soon as you want to move to a higher speed you almost inevitably have to replace the cable with a new one to support the higher speed.

In the meantime had you just installed singled mode fibre in the first place you could just replace the optics at either end. The money you saved by cheaping out with multimode has now evaporated.

That said I still use it where the cable runs are short and not permanent (aka I need to get to two racks over and a DAC cable won't reach). Other than that it's single mode every time. The head of our networks at work has finally come to the same conclusion and it's now single mode everywhere unless you have a really good reason otherwise.

The other main change has been the standardization on LC connectors. Well apart from GPON which seems to have standardized on SC simplex. Those FC connectors where a nightmare, and MT-RJ never seems to have taken off and I have never seen them in a deployment anywhere.

The MTO/MTP connectors seem to be gaining a bit of ground now too. Had to use them for some 40Gbps links last year because QSFP+'s that would have taken ordinary LC connectors with duplex cable where on a greater than six months lead time I hate AOC cables, the weight of the SFP/QSFP just makes running them a nightmare, and if you damage the fibre it's game over. Also if a lasers go bad (happens more than you might imagine) then you are replacing the whole cable, which again argh.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I installed a 10GB/s fibre optic network in a friend's house, super superfast, but what a pain in the neck

I don't think it's that awkward, having seen some commercial installers bash through splice trays I don't think the time penalty compared to doing twisted pair to a similar standard is massive. But I have yet to see it 'to the desk' in a commercial environment, there are still advantages to Cat6A in that setting.

At a domestic level I pulled a load of pre-term patch cable through my house alongside the Cat6, admittedly I would only recommend it for a self-install where you know the routes and won't damage them in future, but I expect it to last for a long time.

Having some SC/APC on a patch panel beside the altnet entry point raised an impressed eyebrow when their tech came around! The knowledge that there would be an extra connection on the optical path didn't bother them.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I should do a little thread on fibre and on how much that has changed and developed in the last 25 years too.

Incredibly more so than copper LAN cabling in many ways. Not just fibre itself, but much like Moores Law the incredible price drop in “actives”

Even back in the day copper Ethernet was expensive. In 1990 a 10Base2 ISA cards where the thick end of £200 each. The main thing that has changed in fibre is the proliferation of multimode fibre standards, going from OM1 throught to OM5 now. I have long held the view that multimode fibre is something of a mugs game. Sure it's cheaper in the short term but as soon as you want to move to a higher speed you almost inevitably have to replace the cable with a new one to support the higher speed.

In the meantime had you just installed singled mode fibre in the first place you could just replace the optics at either end. The money you saved by cheaping out with multimode has now evaporated.

That said I still use it where the cable runs are short and not permanent (aka I need to get to two racks over and a DAC cable won't reach). Other than that it's single mode every time. The head of our networks at work has finally come to the same conclusion and it's now single mode everywhere unless you have a really good reason otherwise.

The other main change has been the standardization on LC connectors. Well apart from GPON which seems to have standardized on SC simplex. Those FC connectors where a nightmare, and MT-RJ never seems to have taken off and I have never seen them in a deployment anywhere.

The MTO/MTP connectors seem to be gaining a bit of ground now too. Had to use them for some 40Gbps links last year because QSFP+'s that would have taken ordinary LC connectors with duplex cable where on a greater than six months lead time I hate AOC cables, the weight of the SFP/QSFP just makes running them a nightmare, and if you damage the fibre it's game over. Also if a lasers go bad (happens more than you might imagine) then you are replacing the whole cable, which again argh.

Token Ring, the closest competition, was comparatively more expensive than Ethernet, let alone FDDI or god forbid ATM. By the end of the decade Ethernet had pretty much wiped the floor with the other competing LAN standards and it became dirt cheap, further cementing its dominance. It became so dominant as we know its reached well past LAN heritage.

re single and multi-mode fibre - it was harder to see, back then at least, how much the cost of actives would drop. Like perhaps 500 fold or more...crazy when you think about it. When I used to design for commercial office clients, we'd always hedge and put single mode and multimode backbone links in a roughly 50/50 split - typically clients would ignore the SM and just use MM for all their inter-switch links.

As you say single-mode fibre hasn't really changed that much - the two actual changes in the fibre itself, that spring to mind are the widespread adoption of zero water peak fibre and I guess bend-insensitive (or should that be bend tolerant) cabling. Just better manufacturing really.

Connectors on the other hand have always been a bit of a lottery as to what was going to succeed or fail long term. When LC came in the late nineties it was quite a revolution everything for the previous decade being mainly ST or SC. MT-RJ was a bit of a flash in the pan pushed hard by Molex, but failed to grab a foothold. Installers didn't really like them much either.

I'll reserve judgement on the more modern high-density connectors...

Just sniffing around the Ethernet Alliance website, whilst getting links for another thread I stumbled across a series of blogs on a series of interviews with the the guys from PARC that basically invented Ethernet in 1973 (the year I was born!)

Interviews: The Voices of Ethernet

YouTube: Retro 10base5 Thicknet and 10base2 Thinnet network