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What was a Token Ring network?

What was a Token Ring network?

ibobev

Comments (68)

  • baud9600
    A very nice trip down memory lane. The big banks bought token ring because nobody gets fired for buying IBM, and Ethernet looked so amateurish compared to the heft of TR cables and chunky spaceship MAUs. Hermaphrodite connectors, remember those? I knew a bank that ran TR at 4mbps, connecting its head office buildings nearby and was considering an upgrade to 16 - it seemed mysteriously fast in those days. But then Ethernet came along, and SCO Unix servers on 486, so it was relatively easy and affordable to get a department of 30 people up and running with PCs as terminals. Those were the days…
  • blakesterz
    The "WAS" in that title just made me feel really old. I remember learning about this in college and it being a thing that I would need to work with and understand how it works why it's different than ethernet. And now it's just a big "WAS".
  • js2
    TokenRing was already an academic curiosity when I was getting my CS degree in the mid-90s. The CS department by that point had already switched to twisted-pair Ethernet. By the time of my first job in the late 90s, we used FDDI for our web farm's backend network, but we tore that out with the arrival of gigabit, so FDDI didn't last too long either.
  • EvanAnderson
    My local hospital system (Premier Health) was all-in on IBM and token ring. I remember being chagrined when they built a new hospital in 1998 and wired everything for token ring. The writing was clearly on the wall for token ring by 1998 but their IT department bled IBM blue.Fast-forward to 2013, when my wife was giving birth to our daughter in one of their hospitals, and I noticed an unused type-1 token ring wall jack in our room right beside some occupied 8P8C (aka RJ-45) jacks.
  • jwr
    We used to love token ring style networks (specifically ARCNET) for playing Doom, Descent and Quake back in the day. ARCNET was more annoying to set up and had thicker cables, but it was rock-solid reliable afterwards. Totally bulletproof.In comparison to that, traditional ethernet (think concentric cabling and terminators) glitched often and one flaky part of a cable could ruin your day.ARCNET was much slower in theory, but robust, fair and stable and did not totally die under load from a single client.
  • prirun
    I worked with Prime minicomputers when I was a late teen. They introduced RingNet, a token ring product, in 1979.Fun fact: each system had an IN and an OUT coax port, and the coax cable was about as thick as a thumb. If a system died, a small hardware box short circuited, tying the IN and OUT coaxes together. This kept the ring intact, but it would also make that segment of the network longer and there were strict distance limitations between nodes. If the distance got too big, the entire ring broke. Also, if any coax cable got damaged, that also lead to a ring break. Prime had a special diagnostic program they could use on multiple nodes to try to find ring breaks.
  • dlinder
    Token-passing networks were interesting for hard real time system analysis, as they featured deterministic access control instead of collision detection. They made possible extending Rate Monotonic Scheduling theory to the network layer as well. The priority work (priority ceiling protocol, multi level token priority schemes) survive today in token bucket rate limiting.
  • alexpotato
    Fun fact:When I was an intern at Merck in the late 1990s, the networking team was switching over from Token Ring to Ethernet.It was so much work that they were openly recruiting anyone who was an employee or intern to come in on a weekend and help out. They eventually offered to pay people extra and a couple of my intern buddies took up the offer.
  • HarHarVeryFunny
    Short version:Token Ring was a networking alternative to Ethernet.With Ethernet when a node wants to transmit it just does so, then backs off and retries if there was a collision (someone else trying to transmit at the same time).Token Ring avoided collisions by passing a "permission to transmit" token from node to node in circular (ring) fashion.
  • rhdunn
    There's a Minecraft YouTuber called TangoTek who's building a deck building game called Decked Out 3 in Minecraft. That is using a token ring system to control events and messages sent in the game to avoid conflicts [1].[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R18APaR7mTQ at 28:54.
  • dspillett
    > and unlike Ethernet, all the cards on the ring had to talk at the same speed.Essentially that was the same for Ethernet too, everything on the same leg needs to talk at the same speed, though IIRC a different speed device wouldn't take down everything, it would just cause a significant excess of collisions due to the out-of-sync cross-talk and not be able to talk to anything itself. It wasn't until switching hubs and full switches were around that you could mix speeds on the same leg (with a switching hub you'd actually have two legs, one at each speed, bridged, with a full switch you have a separate collision domain per port so can mix speeds quite freely).
  • cf100clunk
  • PeterWhittaker
    Oh, flashback to learning queueing theory decades ago!In principle, token ring was faster than Ethernet (which was CSMA/CD in the day): the mathematics of token ring were exact and analytic, and, when solved, gave higher speeds and better reliability than Ethernet, the mathematics of which were so complex (think three-body-problem) that analytic solutions were available only for bounding equations, which resolved to slower than token ring.In practice, Ethernet was much faster.A classic "the model is not the territory" problem.
  • hnlmorg
    > Coax connectors for Token Ring did exist, but were more common on Ethernet networks.I don’t disbelieve the author here but anecdotally the only time I’ve worked with coax BNC plugs for networking is with TR. And it be never seen a TR network in the wild that wasn’t coax.It’s interesting to read that other cable types existed for TR.
  • markus_zhang
    The first time I read about this was about 35 years ago. I read about it in a computer science textbook my father owned. I was just a child so I never thought much about it, except that the name was pretty cool.That textbook was sort of system textbook which describes a lot of low level stuffs such as networking, hard disks and such.
  • countrymile
    It was on the GCSE Computer Science curriculum in England until very recently!IBM were still using them in 2004.
  • mannyv
    FYI cable networks (upstream) are essentially token ring.In fact, broadcast ethernet is essentially token ring, except instead of a token it just grabs the wire. Only one machine can grab the wire at a time. Switches hide that from most people.
  • ilamont
    When I started working at Network World magazine in the late 1990s Token Ring was still a technology in our coverage area.It didn't last. Gigabit Ethernet began popping up around the time of the dot-com bubble bursting. That was it for Token Ring.
  • bharrison
  • gosub100
    YouTuber clabretro has numerous videos installing and configuring token ring:https://youtu.be/4UWibKEjyY8?is=rpvYv31UIB3DLIep
  • browningstreet
    Dang, this took me back to the Artisoft LANtastic vs Novell Netware days...
  • sharktheone
    I really did not think I would hear about token ring again
  • Kye
  • 0xbadcafebee
    At a 2600 conference long ago, we built a cluster of public X11 dumb terminals, so hackers at the conference could browse the web and such. We hardened the server against local user attack, and the clients booted from a read only solid state media (aka, floppy disk) with no port access. But how do you harden a physical network against a thousand hackers? Solution: token ring. We made the network so ancient that nobody would have the hardware to hack it that weekend. Worked great.
  • zen_kernal
    I was something I learned about in college and then never encountered again. Until today.
  • bell-cot
    Summary: Something that coulda been really cool & awesome, if not for crappy decisions made by the Dark Lord...er, I mean IBM.Lot more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_Ring
  • kjs3
    I find this guy kinda annoying. I mean, yeah...seems like he did some networking back in the day, but everything he posts is just enough off (or ia Google-correct, not Been-There-correct) that I can't quite take him seriously.The main reason Ethernet won the war was because it was cheaper.He should have stopped there. That was it. And because it was cheaper, less complicated to build the chips, 'good enough' networking, a bunch of folks jumped on the bandwagon. And here we are.If you had a 16 megabit network and brought up a system at 4 megabits, it took down the whole network.Well, yes, everyone who has ever mentioned TR tells some variation of this. And if you left the terminator off of the coax ethernet, you brought the whole network down. But TR got smart MAUs and ethernet got UTP hubs around the same time and problem solved.And hubs were a lot cheaper than smart MAUs. Sooo...Ethernet was junk if you went with the cheapest options all around, but you could make it acceptable if you invested some of the savings in improved technology.Just like TR. If you were deploying dirt cheap 8228s after 1990 or so, your network still sucked. You didn't do that.But the other reason Ethernet won was because of scale.Yes, there was a thing called 100Mb Token Ring. Someone might have even shipped some number of them. I never saw one in the wild, and I don't know anyone who claimed they had who didn't work for IBM or Madge (which, btw, wasn't an 'obscure' network company at the time and made more than just TR cards).That's because basically everyone who did Token Ring (IBM most of all) had decided that you wanted to scale TR you were going to ATM (for a bunch of mostly political and marketing reasons). Which, unlike TR, was in reality a very bad idea, but that's another story.I've never even heard anyone even suggest 128Mb Token Ring, and I suspect someones LLM is hallucinating. There was a gigabit Token Ring standard (IEEE 802.5v), but I feel pretty confident saying noone ever shipped it. Like I said...ATM was gonna be the future.Ethernet used a 15-pin connector that looks quite a bit like a PC joystick connector. Token Ring used a 9-pin connector that looks like a 9-pin video connector or an Atari style joystick plug.Ok...I'll just be snarky and point out there are ethernet cards that use a 9-pin D-sub connector to reuse a TR wiring physical plant. I have several.Coax connectors for Token Ring did existCitation needed. I've seen coax for 802.4 industrial networking stuff, which is not TR. I'm betting more hallucinations.ARCNET was another competitor from the same timeframe. It, too, was a contender for a while because it was backed by Datapoint, a pioneer in office automation using small computers.Arcnet was a contender because it was even cheaper than ethernet and it was (and still is) widely used in industrial environments. And some popular early PC file sharing systems (e.g. LANTastic) would use Arcnet.
  • quickthrowman
    Why is the title written in the past tense? ARC156 is still being used in 2026, Automated Logic’s WebCTRL BAS system uses it for communication.https://www.automatedlogic.com/en/media/AAR_CS-aug2023_tcm70...