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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

I remember finding an old hub off in a far corner in 2008 working on my school’s network. It was a rare find then!

Hubs were still just barely still relevant when I first started learning networking, but it was late enough that I don't think I've ever encountered one in serious use. Especially after port mirroring became a common feature even on affordable switches. I think we had an old pile of industrial/scientific test equipment in grad school nobody wanted to touch that was using an old Cisco hub, but my memory is fuzzy.

I've definitely never seen any old Thicknet networks in use, though I have seen Token Ring in active use semi-recently. I never learned anything about Token Ring other than I remember old CompTIA mentioning it existed.

I do have a fondness for seeing this old tech that was way out of my reach or just barely too old to encounter back in the day being used, it's so neat to learn about. ClabRetro on YouTube is one of my few "drop everything and watch a new video" creators.

Back in 1999 I was still doing the crawling-under-desks thing. I was at a tobacco companies sales office... and they had a wallplate with ports labeled token ring, ethernet, and appletalk (looked rj11, so phonenet?). A year or two later I worked at their central location in Virginia in a warehouse decommisioning old equipement, got to see some FDDI and HIPPI hardware. Never saw it being used though.

And at my previous job, in a quite normal office, there was a wallplate labeled DEC with the weirdest jack I've ever seen. I couldn't visually identify it, and I thought I knew everything. 1.5" inches wide, with a plastic spring-loaded cover that came down from the top. Maybe only two conductors in it, not normal rj-style pins at all. I'd guess something Vax, but I thought those were always ethernet since the early 80s, and anything older still wouldn't likely have survived until 2025.

This reminded me of my first encounter with Thicknet (and thinnet) just a few years ago.

We'd never gone over it when I went to college in 2012 but come 2022, I found myself learning about it by pulling it out of the ceiling during a decluttering project.

Made some sense, though. Being a TV station, coaxial cable was probably very plentiful when it was installed. We saved a couple of the vampire clamps at the time just for laughs. I wonder if they're still in the office.

Hubs were pretty common when I went to college (2003-2007), but not for the school's infrastructure. They would lend them to students because the rooms only had a single network port. Not sure how long that use case lasted; I imagine by now renovations have happened and rooms have multiple network ports (and the dorms would have wireless in any case).

You were one generation before me, I started college in 2007. By then it was all those super cheap little 4 port Netgear switches most people reading this have probably owned at some point. I don't remember us having official dorm wifi but we were allowed to have our own wireless routers, probably an IT nightmare by today's standards. I recall we also all got publicly routable IP4s.

Hubs were valuable at our CS dept because you could sniff traffic easily with accurate timestamps

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