• rekabis
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    2 months ago

    But are you older than token ring?

    Considering that token ring was first released by IBM almost exactly a decade after TCP (which I was very specific about - TCP specifically, not TCP/IP), then I would most definitely say yes, I am very much older than token ring.

    Token ring was introduced as a low-cost networking option for smaller offices that did not require the use of (at the time) fiendishly expensive switching and routing equipment. If you wanted to hook a bunch of machines together into a network and had no need for external access, you quite literally needed only the cabling and the cards that were installed in the computers. No hubs. No switches. Nothing else.

    Of course, using token ring also allowed techs to engage in shenanigans such as - when the ring was broken in some way - getting a junior tech to crawl around on the floor looking for the break and the token that fell out of it, to stuff it back into the cable. Sometimes we even did that with particularly difficult customers.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Right, my bad. I read TCP/IP. It’s still early.

      I believe that makes you older than Arpanet, which is what I was really asking.

      • rekabis
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        2 months ago

        Right, my bad. I read TCP/IP. It’s still early.

        🤣🤣🤣 Quite alright. It’s 5AM somewhere on the planet, no?

        I believe that makes you older than Arpanet, which is what I was really asking.

        If you had asked me if I was older than Arpanet, then no. It first came online a few short years before I was born.

        Even though the “IP” in TCP/IP came four years after TCP, the introduction of TCP is frequently cited as the “birth of modern networking”, and as such, the Internet.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Gotcha. I was born in '80 so I only read about such things. My dad had Internet at the house for work as early as '86, but I didn’t really start using it until '88 or so