On Mon, 11 Apr 2022, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: > > I think "hub" is another word for "repeater" (just like "switch" is another > > word for "bridge"). > > Interesting. > > Do you know of any documentation, preferably not marketing materials, that > used "repeater" in lieu of "hub"?
As I recall back in mid 1990s nobody around at the university used to call plain 10BASE2 repeaters hubs. We'd only call multiport 10BASE-T devices hubs (aka concentrators), where each port only serves one device in a point-to-point topology (i.e. no shared medium such as with 10BASE5 or 10BASE2). We had a bunch (4 or 5) of IIRC 5-port 10BASE2 repeaters for our network at our hall of residence. Each 10BASE2 port served ~20 hosts so as not to exceed 10BASE2's maximum segment length. I'm not sure anymore if the repeaters had an AUI port; I think they did, but if so, it wasn't used. They were connected into one network via a bridge, which was an 80286 PC equipped with a corresponding number of NE2000 clones and running a piece of DOS software called Kbridge. It was to reduce network congestion, which often happened anyway when multiple groups of people played networked (IPX) Doom all at a time. Also nobody would call a device a switch if it didn't do cut-through. We'd call devices doing store-and-forward only bridges; after all there's no actual circuit switching in store-and-forward. I guess these terms became fuzzier with time as non-techies started confusing them. FWIW, Maciej
