SneakerNet was far more common in the world were most people actually lived and if there was a digital network there is a good chance it was Novell or Token Ring.

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skissane 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> if there was a digital network there is a good chance it was Novell or Token Ring

As the other commenter pointed out already, the vast majority of Netware networks used Ethernet. I knew what Token Ring was, but I don't think I ever actually saw it, my knowledge of it was purely from books and magazines. My dad's work (a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant) was somewhat of an IBM shop in that their main computer was an AS/400 that ran the whole factory, but I interned in their IT department for two weeks in 1997 (I think I'd just turned 15) and I don't remember seeing any Token Ring, or hearing it even mentioned.

And this is the thing, I was a teenager in the 1990s, I was there. I saw Ethernet (and Acorn Econet too, which is much more obscure). I saw it at my school. I saw it at my dad's work. I remember one of my school friends had Ethernet in his house (not in the walls, they just had 2-3 computers in the family room connected to a hub/switch). I was trying to convince my dad to buy Ethernet cards but he wasn't sold on the idea–he was familiar with it from work (his field was chemistry and pharmaceutical manufacturing not computing, but he was technical enough to know what it was), but at home he was happy with Laplink. We had dial-up Internet before we had Ethernet; we had multiple computers, more than one of them had a modem, and my siblings and I would fight over who would use the dial-up since only one of us could use it at once. I remember around 1998 I was invited to a LAN party at a church, but I didn't go.

"the world were most people actually lived" is a bit meaningless, because then we are talking about what was happening in rural villages in Africa at the time. In the world in which I lived, my 1990s, Ethernet was widespread, first in school/work settings, and by the end of it, it was really taking off in home settings too. Maybe your 1990s were different from mine (different country/geography, different social milieu), or maybe you weren't actually there to experience it firsthand.

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brudgers 3 days ago | parent [-]

My 1990’s were indeed different.

I was firmly into adulthood when they began, I worked at ordinary small businesses, and was often involved in technology purchasing decisions.

Where I was working in 1997, I set up the company’s Yahoo email…one address for the whole office which went to the receptionist’s computer. Which was fine because important communication was done by phone or fax and if you needed to reach someone out of their office you probably called their pager…though cell phones were around, most business people could not justify the expense and cell phone culture did not exist yet.

The office moved files with floppy disks via courier or USPS. Backups were to Qic tape and files moved within the office via sneaker net…cd burners were still uncommon, large, SCSI, slow, and expensive. So Zip disks were more common.

To put it another way, I spent all 10 years of the 1990’s using computers for work. It was a very different life.

	▲	skissane 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We lived in different geographies (you were somewhere in the US, I was in Sydney, Australia), being exposed to different types of enterprises: for me a private Catholic high school, and the Australian branch of the global US-headquartered pharmaceutical company for which my father worked. I suspect your experiences were in part a product of which industry you were in, and which end of that industry - in another comment you mentioned DOS-based CAD software, in the early 1990s some big firms (especially in aerospace, defence, automotive) were still using IBM mainframe-based CAD systems running on IBM 7437s and 5080s (and if you could afford that fiendishly expensive kit, you could afford networking and likely already had it); as the 1990s progressed, mainframe-based CAD increasingly moved to UNIX workstations, for which Ethernet was very standard. And DOS-based CAD software and networking were not mutually exclusive-NetWare worked fine with DOS, and my high school had a CAD lab running the DOS version of Bentley MicroStation (IIRC, the DOS version we used was still branded Intergraph not Bentley), but all the machines were connected to Ethernet and we logged in to them using NetWare. Similarly, at my dad’s work almost all PCs ran Windows 3.x, but there were a few DOS-only machines connected to various pieces of laboratory or manufacturing equipment for which the software was DOS-only (and had issues running under a Windows 3.x DOS box) - and they connected those machines to NetWare too, because NetWare had no problem with DOS-only clients.

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bigfatkitten 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

“Novell” invariably meant a Netware box in a closet that people talked to via IPX/SPX over Ethernet.

Token Ring was rare outside of IBM shops. Only commonly found in places like banks.