On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 11:12 AM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > Vampire taps. Now there's a blast from the past. Somewhere around here > I still have my toolbag which still has my tap drill for installing those > taps.
I also have a tap drill somewhere, but it was a rescue from a clean-out. I've never installed any Thicknet... so far. I did pick up a bit of yellow 10mbit cable at VCF Midwest a couple years back, and a couple of taps. I wish I had one more to make it interesting. I do have some of the boxy transceivers but with 10Base2 BNCs on the mounting plate that can also take a vampire tap mounting plate. One of my long-term low-priority projects is to mount that Ethernet segment high up on a wall, display fashion, and have 2-3 stations and AUI cables hanging down to table height for interconnecting vintage networking gear. I do have 10BaseT hubs with AUI ports and even one or two AUI<->Fiber MAUs to make it all interesting. Something I have that may be of interest here is a small box of N-connector 50 Ohm terminators. I can't ever imagining needing more than 2 pair for my entire life, so if anyone wants to swap for vintage network hardware, let me know. Mostly, I really want one or two of the clamp-on vampire taps, the kind you could unscrew from the transceiver (so that you never had to disturb the tap but you could remove a station). The last time I knew I was using Etherhose was at the South Pole in 1996 - they had a long run of it before they switched all the building interconnects to fiber. It's probably still buried there. -ethan
