By around 1994 it was extremely common in pretty much any office with more than one PC.

Dialup internet (or any internet access at all) was uncommon but LANs were popular, and they very rarely ran IP.

IP didn’t typically come until later in the decade, when the need to share an internet connection arose.

I did a lot of CAD in the 1990’s, most shops had no network and a computer on every desk. The reasons were simple: capital expense and scarcity of technical expertise. By 2000 it was different because networking was cheaper and the network effect had reached the tipping point where other businesses had email, ftp, etc.

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bigfatkitten 3 days ago | parent [-]

It had nothing to do with capital.

A low to mid spec PC cost around $2000, and an NE2000 clone was around $50. RG-58 coax was about 20 cents a foot from Radio Shack.

Windows for Workgroups made the setup pretty trivial, and there was a plethora of folks out there (like me) repairing PCs and setting up LANs for small businesses.

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brudgers 3 days ago | parent [-]

I was involved in those decisions. The people I worked for knew their businesses and knew the importance of cash flow to it. It had a lot to do with capital.

The simple equation was that setting up a network did not look like it would make those companies money. And in the Windows for Workgroups era, running CAD on Windows was a massive performance hit.

Don’t ignore the capital cost of buying Windows versions of Cad software…potentially thousands of dollars per seat. Don’t ignore the cost of graphics cards…the high performance card might not have Windows drivers and every machine might have a different card bought at a different time.

And don’t ignore the cost of a file server that inspires confidence. In an environment where contracts are five to seven figures, the local PC repair shop is not the most enticing risk.

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skissane 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

You don’t need Windows for networking. There was lots of networking software for DOS. NetWare was the most popular, but there were heaps of alternatives: Microsoft/IBM LAN Manager, Banyan VINES, DEC Pathworks, Sun PC-NFS - most of those required a server running some other operating system (such as OS/2, Unix or OpenVMS), but there was also a category of “peer-to-peer” DOS networking software which could operate without a dedicated server, e.g. Artisoft LANtastic, Novell’s NetWare Lite and its successor Personal NetWare

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bigfatkitten 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So what it comes down to is: The handful of places you worked in a specific industry didn’t want to spring for some ethernet cards, and so therefore office LANs were uncommon?

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brudgers 3 days ago | parent [-]

They were uncommon because they were uncommon. That’s why there was a business installing them. If they were common nobody would have bought them from you.

	▲	skissane 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Wifi networks are very common today, and yet there are heaps of businesses installing them (and they normally have to install Ethernet at the same time, to connect the access points to the broadband router/modem). The same is true of air conditioners, solar panels, household batteries, rainwater tanks, surveillance cameras, building alarms, fire alarms, fire suppression systems, elevators Your suggestion that the existence of businesses installing something is evidence the thing is uncommon, is illogical