We got the LAN cards, coax cables, and T-connectors for cheap (or free?!) as I guess many businesses were already upgrading to the simpler and more flexible 10Base-T around that time. Terminators were very difficult to get, but we could make them at home by taking a segment of coax and soldering a resistor between the inner and outer conductors!
You loaded a DOS IPX driver for the LAN card before starting up DOOM. I think there was some way to share files and mount drives between PCs without a server, too, but I forget the details of that.
No switch or hub hardware was required - all the nodes on the network were just connected by one big string of coax with our home-made "terminators" at each end.
The whole thing was very fragile as any break on the cable (or disconnection of a terminator) at any point would take the whole network down. But for a home network it was fine. Good times!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhoneNet
There were a few games we played over the network, like Super Maze Wars or Marathon.
http://macintoshgarden.org/games/super-maze-wars
http://macintoshgarden.org/games/marathon
It wasn’t long before we switched to 10BASET.
I distinctly remember moving the PC desktop forward, which pulled the coax from the t-connector, and all the remaining PCs down the line would lose connectivity.
Lots of angry DOOM players losing their network connection.
>The first version of the Doom IPX network code transmitted its data as broadcast data. As a result of this, all machines on a network where a game of Doom was being played would receive the data, even if the machine was not involved in the game. The degrading effect on network performance forced the system administrators for many office networks to ban Doom.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_rBACik...
I feel like I've seen more than a handful of personal sites crushed by HN traffic in recent months. I wonder at the server architecture that can't handle HN traffic. In this awesome, far-future science-fictional year of 2020, it should not be a feat of engineering to write something that can handle a few thousand pageloads. I've had posts visit the front page a couple times, and from the traffic numbers I saw, it's not like you have to handle ten thousand concurrent connections. Ten concurrent connections would do it.
For that tiny one off hacker news hit, your wayback link seems to be working just fine.
Stock out of the box Wordpress on a low end VPS.
Any web server serving a static site, or WordPress with any of the big caching plugins should be fine
Thank you for sharing a bit of history.
The graphics on that Sony monitor with the forest scene...I did not realize that was possible at that time.
Any ‘tech dude’ that’s also a HAM or anyone who’s done work with other radios definitively will disagree that N connectors are only used in labs. I have quite a bit of “consumer grade” gear that uses that connector even (cell signal boosters and Wi-Fi antennas as two examples).
The 15-pin connectors at the ends of the MAU cables were designed to be used vertically, with a latching mechanism to hold it in place. Many Unix workstations mounted the socket horizontally on the motherboard and in that orientation the latch didn't really work. This created all sorts of reliability problems.
I was up on a ladder in the basement of a building and I had to find one of the marks to tap into the cable at the precise spot by moving the ladder.
It was actually pretty fun for a software guy to be able to do this.
There was also the feeling of "engineers doing it right", not like that room full of normal employees on desktops that were always losing their network because someone plugged or unplugged something on their thinnet.
My first home network was 10base2, originally between a 486 and a 386, where we played Doom. was surprised to find out about the grounding requirement for one of the terminators. I never did that. I guess it was a small enough network so it didn't matter.
It's on Hackernews (again) Are people ever going to get over this page?
