Switches will be tough. Hubs will be easier. I have some old 8 port Cisco 10/100 hubs.

Late 1990s to early 2000s is probably you best bet. I use a 6-port D-link DES 1005D 10/100 switch from 2002. I also have an Allied Telesyn AT-FSW716 16 port 10/100 switch which given me when the company I was working for at the upgraded there network. Have 8 port hub with coax on the back it I need it. That is daisy chained to the D-Link 10/00 switch.

douglar wrote on 2021-05-23, 04:26:

Switches will be tough. Hubs will be easier. I have some old 8 port Cisco 10/100 hubs.

You probably find they are actually switches my friend.

douglar wrote on 2021-05-23, 04:26:

Switches will be tough. Hubs will be easier. I have some old 8 port Cisco 10/100 hubs.

Thank you. I am seeing a bunch of hubs. I can't remember their function as compared to switches, as I only ever owned one hub, back in 1999-2000. I remember using a crossover cable before buying it so that my friend could play Ultima Online on my K6-2 350 in the same room with me and my Gateway Pentium III that I'm recreating. I do remember someone telling me that I needed a switch instead of the hub for some reason. I'll have to read up on it.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-05-23, 04:39:

Late 1990s to early 2000s is probably you best bet. I use a 6-port D-link DES 1005D 10/100 switch from 2002. I also have an Allied Telesyn AT-FSW716 16 port 10/100 switch which given me when the company I was working for at the upgraded there network. Have 8 port hub with coax on the back it I need it. That is daisy chained to the D-Link 10/00 switch.

Thanks! I saw some Allied Telesyn switches on ebay, and they certainly have that retro look. I tried looking up reviews from the 90's. The internet is weird anymore, and I feel that it used to be a lot better for finding information. I'll use my newer Dlink switches until I choose a retro one. I'm looking for a cable to plug my MT-32 into the line in on my AWE32, and run some CAT5 under the floor and across the room, and then I'm going to start actually using these PCs instead of tinkering with them, hehehe. I'll still be adding or changing things, such as upgrading my 4GB CF cards to 8GB on the 486, so I have time to research and pick a switch and some other things.

Netgear had a range of unmanaged switches, 4, 8 and 16 port, IIRC in either the late 90s or very early 00s. I ran a Netgear setup at home in circa 97 to share cable internet, but the switch came later as I used my computer as a proxy first. Maybe some support manuals for the switches could assist, usually they have the copyright date close to the date of manufacture in them.

There is literally zero point to choosing a hub over a switch - think of ethernet like a utility as you would your electrical or phone lines. You don't interact directly with it, but if it's not working as expected then you'll only ever have a bad experience.

The only reason that people used hubs, rather than switches in the early 90's is that switches were new and expensive and only tended to be used in business or academic environments (although I'm sure lots of cheapskates saved a few £/$ and went for hubs instead of switches there, too).

A hub is simply a more efficient means of connecting multiple computers to a single transmitting cable than was possible as with old style co-ax BNC/'thin-net', or even older 'thick-net' with vampire taps. But rather that using T-connectors and BNC coax, 8P8C (aka RJ45) cables made it easier to make-and-break connections or add additional stations. However, just as with coax there's no isolation between stations and once you get more than a couple of stations on the same network segment all trying to send/receive at the same time you get ethernet collisions and the stations resort to using the exponential backoff algorithm to attempt to retransmit. It's a horrible setup, really.

Once the cost of implementing switching technology in a small amount of silicon came down to acceptable levels, hubs simply disappeared as they were completely inferior in every single aspect, compared to a switch.

If you go with hubs, I've seen this come up in second-hand market quite often: 8-port CentreCom MR820TR (pic: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Allie … Hub_MR820TR.jpg).

I think it looks very nicely 90's techy and the "network load" indicator (in addition to the collision light, which will be blinking a lot) on the front adds a lot of coolness to it 😀 The manual is dated 1997 so it would be pretty contemporary. It also has a coax and AUI ports on the back so it's handy for bridging to other old stuff if needed.

I have two of these; one had a fault but was easily repaired by replacing couple of electrolytics on the PSU.

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-05-23, 08:54:

There is literally zero point to choosing a hub over a switch - think of ethernet like a utility as you would your electrical or […]
Show full quote

There is literally zero point to choosing a hub over a switch - think of ethernet like a utility as you would your electrical or phone lines. You don't interact directly with it, but if it's not working as expected then you'll only ever have a bad experience.

The only reason that people used hubs, rather than switches in the early 90's is that switches were new and expensive and only tended to be used in business or academic environments (although I'm sure lots of cheapskates saved a few £/$ and went for hubs instead of switches there, too).

A hub is simply a more efficient means of connecting multiple computers to a single transmitting cable than was possible as with old style co-ax BNC/'thin-net', or even older 'thick-net' with vampire taps. But rather that using T-connectors and BNC coax, 8P8C (aka RJ45) cables made it easier to make-and-break connections or add additional stations. However, just as with coax there's no isolation between stations and once you get more than a couple of stations on the same network segment all trying to send/receive at the same time you get ethernet collisions and the stations resort to using the exponential backoff algorithm to attempt to retransmit. It's a horrible setup, really.

Once the cost of implementing switching technology in a small amount of silicon came down to acceptable levels, hubs simply disappeared as they were completely inferior in every single aspect, compared to a switch.

All true, but the same applies to pretty much everything else we're discussing here in terms of old hardware and old software. There are even people trying to emulate dial-up modem connections...

If you're into period-correct setups and building a late 1990s home LAN, a cheap hub fits the picture. Any switches from that period would have been way out of budget for home use and would tend to also be rather large with high power draw to match. Sure, you suffer all the half-duplex single collision domain downsides of a hub, but conversely, you're (assumption...) not using an old setup like this for any modern applications requiring high bandwidth and efficienct and low latency. You can perfecly play an AoE or UT99 LAN game over a hub.

Personally I can't be bothered to get that period correct and I just use a 16 port managed switch I had left for my retro rigs. I do however have a box full of RG-58 coax with BNC connectors I one day intend to use for a nice nostalgic 10Base2 network. Maybe I'll roll it out when I upgrade my WAN to 2.5GbE (expecting a new high-end modem that needs testing in a few months' time), just for contrast 😉

Oh god no, let terminators reside in the trash heap of network history!

😁

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-05-23, 11:10:

Oh god no, let terminators reside in the trash heap of network history!

Twisted pair Ethernet had its growing pains and throughput problems, but there were fewer situations that caused total failure.

I still flinch whenever someone mentions "terminating resistor" or "beaconing MAU".

don't forget about the ground loops with 10base2 and 10base5

weedeewee wrote on 2021-05-23, 13:02:

don't forget about the ground loops with 10base2 and 10base5

The one thing I really won't forget is the time I ran out of hands while crawling behind some computers troubleshooting the network and stuck the live coax in my mouth. Note: don't try this at home kids.

dionb wrote on 2021-05-23, 13:12:

weedeewee wrote on 2021-05-23, 13:02:

don't forget about the ground loops with 10base2 and 10base5

The one thing I really won't forget is the time I ran out of hands while crawling behind some computers troubleshooting the network and stuck the live coax in my mouth. Note: don't try this at home kids.

🤣

Well, I never tried to suck the bits out of the coax, but I had several occurrences of getting this tingly sensation when plugging or unplugging the coax from a computer.
Lan parties where the whole network was coax were the worst.

So pulled out the 1996, 2nd edition of Networking For Dummies... according to that, a switch is what you connect a parallel printer to, to share it between 2-4 computers... and 100Mbit does not get a mention either. What does get a mention is Netware, LANtastic, Banyan Vines etc, managed networks with a server were a thing for larger networks, partially because you want to manage traffic, more than a dozen or two peer to peer clients on 10 base T had the problems mentioned of spamming out the network, because of everything transmitting to everything at random times. Large LANs tended to be segmented by bridges and/or routers until switches evolved. This they did in 1990 https://web.archive.org/web/20100105152318/ht … products_5.html but like the fact that not everybody was taking transatlantic vacation flights the minute after Alcock and Brown made it across in 1919, switches weren't for everybody for some years, see the cost quoted there. Round about the mid 90s, they were still equipment, that went in racks, heavy infrastructure, not SOHO appliances. You'll note how they were 7 port, this is probably to edge out the solution of having a ($10,000) Novell or other server with 5 or 6 NICs installed (Configured as multiport bridge). You can begin to see how token ring was seen as superior just either side of 1990ish.

Oldest SOHO types available? I don't know offhand.... seems like the Dlink DSS series have been around forever, they put lipstick on these old pigs from time to time, the oldest ones are a dull green plain box. The DSS-16 is the oldest one I've got.

This is the oldest I've seen advertised in PC Magazine so far, http://nice.kaze.com/wadai2203.html Netgear sw507, you'll need google translate on that, it's Japanese. By early 1997 price had dropped to ~$800

Our first home lan was coax. A Win98 ystem was sharing a ppp connection using a small software proxy application to share the line with 486dx2/66 Redhat 6.0 system and a OS/2 v4 Warp system. Never really had much problem with it being my first lan setup. Learnt a lot seting that up.

Thank you all for the information! I love all of the discussions of retro PC tech and software; I love that VOGONS exists for such discussions. I don't know anyone who lives in my town who is into this stuff, and this forum is my only outlet for discussing retro computing. The people who live nearby who experienced this stuff with me back in the day think it is weird that I am into this stuff, because it is "old," and they only use modern PCs and components, and they play only newer games, for some reason.

It seems that the general consensus is that I should look for an ethernet hub from the 90's. I am going to try to find one that is beige/white/grey and see if I can set it up on the retro desk somewhere. I am attempting to set everything up so that it looks like I stepped out of a time machine into a home office from the 90's on one half of the room, and during the Athlon XP era on the other half of the room.

After I select the hub, I am going to look into building a 90's era server to host games and files from 1980-2000, basically. Maybe a dual P3 system. I also want to build a modern media server to serve the entire house for streaming music, movies, games, anything. The servers will be an ongoing project as I research and collect parts over time.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-05-23, 16:24:

Our first home lan was coax. A Win98 ystem was sharing a ppp connection using a small software proxy application to share the line with 486dx2/66 Redhat 6.0 system and a OS/2 v4 Warp system. Never really had much problem with it being my first lan setup. Learnt a lot seting that up.

Yah, I only had about 3 computers worth doing modern for the time things on, so those got networked with thin coax, until about 1999 where I picked up an 8 port hub with a coax segment... then I had a coax/10baseT mix until about 2005, when I went 100Mbit 4 port router and wifi.. then since I've tended to use used/cheap/free wifi routers as switches/hubs, not having many hardlined machines in one area. Might dig out the coax hub and powerline interweb it into the current network, since I don't have TP adapters for older machines only thin coax/AUI 8 bit cards and period 16 bit cards for pre 95ish.