what about 48 bits?

Mon Apr 5 03:08:02 UTC 2010

On 4/4/2010 19:16, Mark Smith wrote:
<-snip->
> Actually the IEEE have never called it "Ethernet", it's all been IEEE
> 802.3 / XXX{BASE|BROAD}-BLAH.
>
> "Ethernet", assuming version 1 and 2, strictly means thick coax, vampire
> taps and AUI connectors running at (half-duplex) 10Mbps. I saw some of
> it once.
>   
I worked with it at my first job at a large government institution. 
Talk about painful and unweildy.  We had parts of our network wired with
10base5 (thick ethernet) with vampire taps, and had some segments wired
with transceivers which had a pair of threaded "type N connectors" (not
sure if this is the proper name ... it's what my boss called them ...
looked like oversized CATV F connectors).   The xceiver boxes were
pretty big (4-5 inches wide) and connected to the node via an AUI  drop
cable.

The N connectors were easier to deal with than the vampire taps.  To add
a node, you just "spliced" a new xceiver box onto the line where you
needed it by screwing a new length of cable into the new + existng
xceivers, then connecting the AUI drop cable from the box to the node.

Eventually we went to 10base2 (thin ethernet) and then like everyone
else, 10baseT hubs. 