<story><title>Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller</title><url>https://www.righto.com/2021/02/strange-chip-teardown-of-vintage-ibm.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>devoutsalsa</author><text>I worked on a token ring network back in the 90s.  There were more employees than network ports.  So every time someone complained of not having network connectivity, we&amp;#x27;d find a network cable where the light on the port wasn&amp;#x27;t lit up from activity, usually because someone was out sick or on vacation.  If everyone decided to come into the office, we would have had a problem, but I don&amp;#x27;t think it ever happened while I was there.</text></comment>
<story><title>Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller</title><url>https://www.righto.com/2021/02/strange-chip-teardown-of-vintage-ibm.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TedDoesntTalk</author><text>Token-ring networks could have ruled the world. But IBM’s insistence on licensing fees made the equipment expensive compared to Ethernet.&lt;p&gt;Token-ring was faster: 16 Mbps with no collisions, vs Ethernet’s 10 Mbps in a perfect world... but in reality it was slower when accounting for collisons and retries. No so with token ring.&lt;p&gt;If IBM had licensed the tech without fees, hardware would have been competitive to Ethernet and today we’d all be using 1 Gbps token ring in our homes.&lt;p&gt;But now I’d be surprised if a token-ring driver even exists for Windows 10 or MacOS.</text></comment>