But times have changed a lot. In those days there was more focus on collision detection and avoidance which is no longer relevant with today's switches.
Ps it was not the same coax as for TV. TV coax has 75 ohms impedance. Ethernet (and most radio equipment) uses 50 ohms. It was annoying not being able to those cable TV stuff but handy for me as a radio amateur to be able to use the same cables.
When the most common data transfer technology is a POTS modem that can do 56kb/second...
At college we used to have rooms with 24 X-terminals with 1280x1024 screens - huge for the day. All on one single shared 10mbit!
And wow it was speedy. Because all we did was locally rendered motif window managers, locally rendered fonts and widgets etc. Windows weren't moved animated but just the border was shown while moving.
Fast forward to the 56k days and everyone was running mosaic and netscape scrolling to pages loaded with bitmap images, scrolling marquee text (server rendered usually) and animated under construction images. It was anything but speedy at that point - lol.
From that point onwards things moved on really fast.
Ten whole megabits to share between up to 30 computers, on a single multidrop bus.
Anybody else remember "vampire connections"?
[Ah, a minute late. FFP999 remembers them.]