Comment on Can't throw me off the scent
FrowingFostek@lemmy.world 3 days agoThe blast resistant stuff is pretty neat too. I just hate dealing with the gel/icky-pick when you have to terminate the cable.
Comment on Can't throw me off the scent
FrowingFostek@lemmy.world 3 days agoThe blast resistant stuff is pretty neat too. I just hate dealing with the gel/icky-pick when you have to terminate the cable.
rumba@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
I used to absolutely love putting vampire taps on thicknet.
Okay, now we’re going to put an AUI connector right here. First you’re going to need this drill, to drill a hole into the cable… Wait what?
FrowingFostek@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You speak the language of the elders. I started with cat6, everything before that is Greek to me lol.
rumba@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Heh, It was a piece of coax cable but it was really thick and bright yellow. I was about the same thickness as an average sized thumb. The whole thing ran at ten megabit.
It had a crap ton of shielding in it. It wasn’t the kind of cable you could just bend around a corner you had to give it room to bend. Because of the shielding and relatively low speed, it could run a very long distance (500 meters)
The vampire taps were these beige metal boxes with a stainless steel cradle on top that locked the cable in.
You used a tool to cut the hole in the cable, it was this screwdriver looking thing with a tiny little nub of a drill bit in the end. The nub of drill bit was the exact right length to drill down to the core of the cable and expose the center conductor. All you had to do was make sure that the hole was clear and then none of the ground mesh touched the center conductor or the pin that would have to slide into the hole.
After you drilled the hole you put the coax down into the cradle and turned a screw on the top, It would bite into the ground on one side and a little metal needle would touch the center conductor and the other side.
The coolest part was, shit was coming out all the time, and every time it was something amazing and futuristic. When the technology could barely do anything and all of a sudden you could do something new It was just magical. The advance is all seem kind of boring these days in comparison.
FrowingFostek@lemmy.world 3 days ago
That does sound cool, it must have been pretty labor intensive. How long do you remember these things being used before they were phased out?