this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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Showerthoughts
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The MAU turned a physical star topology into a logical ring topology.
Moving to star was more of an assistance to physical installs
My point is, if you have a shared medium anyway, you can get rid of the MAU by having nodes manage the (virtual) token themselves, basically take limited-time turns based in some order like ascending MAC addresses. You could then wire the cable in any way you want with unlimited junctions, taps, whatever as long as you created a graph where all nodes are connected to each other. The entire point of a token ring is to manage a shared medium (that is, a single pair of wires, either UTP or coax, which can efficiently be wired along the shortest, possibly branching path) because if you have to use a direct connection from every endpoint to an MAU in a star topology, you could just have an Ethernet switch anyway.
The whole point behind it was that everything was too slow to handle it efficiently themselves in an uncontrolled manner. When networks and computers got faster we started using ethernet.
Yes, and it's also that switches got cheaper so most new installations only connect two nodes with a single physical conductor.
The whole point was that cs/ma (check if anyone is talking while you're talking) was a competing strategy to token ring (everyone can talk in their turn).
You could lose most of your bandwidth under contention with csma, it scaled poorly and routers/switches were crazy expensive because they needed to have memory to buffer packets at full flow.
Somebody made an integrated switch ASIC and the price plummeted and suddenly every network was switched.