> "Tandy has developed a sleeping giant of a local area network system."
Actually, ARCNET was developed at Datapoint by John Murphy in 1976 and released in 1977, especially for the Datapoint 2200. It became available for a lot of systems and rivalled other LAN standards, like Token Ring or Novell's NetWare (and, apparently, in rare cases, it's still in use for process control.) In its day it was a giant to be aware of.
Tandy was just one of the many adopters of ARCNET.
In the 90s, when Ethernet cards still cost like 50-100 bucks (more than us kids could afford), I got a large box of around 10 ISA ARCNet cards from a friend who just migrated a small office to Ethernet. There were no hubs or anything.
A "quick" internet search later (this was before Google, so it took a few hours total), I found the schematics for a passive ArcNet hub and built one using spare parts and a cheap plastic box.
It worked extremely well, and it was very flexible since you could mix and match star and bus topologies as you liked. So if someone only had a short cable, they could be connected to the computer next to them with a T connector and go to the central hub that way.
We used this setup for LAN parties for about 2 or 3 years, until everyone had gotten a 100mbit Ethernet card.
Actually, ARCNET was developed at Datapoint by John Murphy in 1976 and released in 1977, especially for the Datapoint 2200. It became available for a lot of systems and rivalled other LAN standards, like Token Ring or Novell's NetWare (and, apparently, in rare cases, it's still in use for process control.) In its day it was a giant to be aware of.
Tandy was just one of the many adopters of ARCNET.
A "quick" internet search later (this was before Google, so it took a few hours total), I found the schematics for a passive ArcNet hub and built one using spare parts and a cheap plastic box.
It worked extremely well, and it was very flexible since you could mix and match star and bus topologies as you liked. So if someone only had a short cable, they could be connected to the computer next to them with a T connector and go to the central hub that way.
We used this setup for LAN parties for about 2 or 3 years, until everyone had gotten a 100mbit Ethernet card.