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 exist

Citation 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.

> Datapoint, a pioneer in office automation using small computers

In 1970, Datapoint created a desktop computer, the Datapoint 2200, with an 8-bit TTL processor. Intel created a microprocessor version of this processor for Datapoint, called the Intel 8008. Datapoint decided to stick with TTL, so Intel ended up selling the 8008 as a general-purpose microprocessor. Intel improved it to make the 8080, then made a 16-bit version, the 8086, as a stopgap product until the iAPX 432 micro-mainframe was ready. The iAPX 432 was a disaster and that's how you ended up with x86.