Comment on Can't throw me off the scent

• rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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  • FrowingFostek@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?

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    • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      By the time I was doing the work the tech was already starting to get old. That particular job was kind of amazing. It was a giant distribution center with something like 3 miles of conveyor belts and the distributed Linux operating system worth one OS ran across 20 nodes.

      We hired a contractor to come in and put fiber. But it was back when fiber was very unforgiving the project took forever to get turned up. They broke about as much as they ran. To be honest I’m not really sure why they bothered with the fiber, All the long distance runs in the warehouse we’re already overkill at 10 megabit.

      For the most part they were just talking to an HP 3000 at serial speeds. All the office PCs and printers that needed better than 100 meg work condensed up in the front and could easily run on Ethernet.

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