On Thu, 28 Jun 2018 at 20:13, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> > The US Electrical Code has not allowed any kind of signal wire in > the same conduit with any kind of power wiring for as far back as > I can remember. Sounds very sensible, but the Isle of Man isn't part of the USA, nor even part of the UK. It's its own little country and this was the late 1980s. I suspect the Manx Electrical Code or equivalent had no mention of data cabling at that time. :-) My employers were still fairly new to this "Ethernet" stuff. In my next job, I installed a few SAGE MainLAN systems, because Ethernet was still too expensive. I don't know what the cabling system in MainLAN was, but it ran at 4Mb/s and IIRC the connectors to the NICs were DE-9. I can only find a few ads for it: https://books.google.cz/books?id=HXDkCoqMiVIC&pg=PP16&lpg=PP16&dq=%22SAGE+MainLAN%22&source=bl&ots=fnPPPF4Hhk&sig=rC_D70XTAU7QipXQed7HBDlS4Yo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwims8Di_PbbAhUPDKwKHUEbBekQ6AEILjAB#v=onepage&q=%22SAGE%20MainLAN%22&f=false No tech description. The Internet has forgotten about it. :-( I think it went up against ArtiSoft LANtastic in its ARCnet incarnation, which I also never saw. MainLAN was much quicker than the $25 Network, which was rare in the UK -- I knew of only a single vendor and I never saw it. http://www.retro.co.za/blog/?p=2539 I believe the $25 Network was similar to Farallon PhoneNet, which I did work on sometimes -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhoneNet PhoneNet was original AppleTalk but over US-style telephone cables with US-style jacks, instead of Apple serial cables, so the cable runs could be much longer. In the UK we couldn't share cabling with phone cables, as we use different connectors for telephone lines to the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_telephone_socket MainLAN was quicker, I think, than PromiseLAN which I also never saw: https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue142/70_Getting_wired.php All the proprietary network interconnects were quickly replaced by Ethernet in my world -- usually 10base-2. A few IBM shops ran Token Ring but I rarely saw it. 10base-T mostly killed off Token Ring, and 100base-T quickly replaced 10base-T. -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
