Building an old 90's Network Using 10BASE2 Ethernet Coax!

[@user-9sidfgsxgj]

Back in 1996 in Odesa, Ukraine we had such network with my 3 buddies at our nearly located to each other appartments. We played Warcraft 2, Doom, Quake, Diablo, Descent. Such an amazing times these were.

[@IoIxD]

There's some comedy to be had in setting up an old bus-style network, and the first stop is an unpopulated ethernet switch :)

[@linuxsuperuser]

y im here lol

[@desktop_pilot]

At the end of the video where you were battling Win98 and Norton brought back some memories and had me laughing so hard. I remember going through those same things countless times helping family and friends, it's a pain you never forget. It really highlights how much has changed with Windows and operating systems in general over the years. Awesome video, you have some sweet machines!

[@circuitrewind]

10BASE2 is still "ethernet" - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 Also, the note about collisions: any hub based network, even RJ45 based networks, have this exact same issue. This is a problem that switches eventually solved, assuming the switch is doing full duplex. Even a single half-duplex link on a modern switch will have collisions.

[@Consequator]

As soon as you mentioned 'Norton Internet security' every person who used computers anywhere from dos to XP just gave you a blank stare lol.

[@billbliss7407]

I started my IT career as a network tech in the early 90's. This is bringing back so many memories! Some of them are even good memories! :D Thanks for sharing this.

[@Okahibe]

Some industrial automation equipment still uses Coax on what I assume is a 10BASE2 network. What I immediately thought of was ControlNet, and I know way too many plants that still use it...

[@TechCellfish]

Lots of memories from old lan parties. Network would suddenly go down when someone joined with a TV coaxial cable.

[@DawsonMakes]

As a network admin in the early 2000s at a university, I built a "box of pain" which had two UTP cables and a power cable hanging out of it. Inside of it was a pair of UTP to coax media converter, and coax to optical media converters, and a power board.. it was a way of simulating bad connections for bad users ;) We moved out last users from 10Base2 in late 2003

[@ej_tech]

The Serial Port recently did a video about the origin of twisted pair Ethernet so it's nice to actually see coax Ethernet.

[@electric_lizzzard]

this is a certified necromancy classic

[@BartKus]

As circuitrewind pointed out, 10base2 is ethernet. If you want a network older than ethernet, you might be able to find some ARCnet hardware. DIP switches set your MAC address!

[@wdd6864]

For the Aptiva, run Scandisk and Fdisk /mbr. Those may fix it

[@SSFighter1701]

For a second I thought that was a 3com switch you were using and it had me remember how those don’t seem to die (worked at a shop a few years back that used old 10/100 switches as emergency backups - and we had a customer running at least 3 of them. I’m pretty sure one of them was a 24-port hub too 😂).

[@kkpdk]

When I first got into 10BASE2, 1MB/s was like 100Gbit/s networking is today: My server's hard disk controller at the time (30MB RLL drive) topped out at 400kByte/s after low level formatting the disk to the optimum interleave. A single machine did not have enough throughput to saturate the network. The NI5010 and NE1000 ethernet cards also lacked the bus bandwidth to go that fast. It was a Large Enough pipe. That was the NETBIOS and IPX days.

[@JuulCPH]

Nice :) I remember showing up for LAN parties in the 90s and if the other boxen weren't grounded properly and you showed up late then you would get shocked when you touched the metal connectors on 10BASE2 run connecting everyone. It was physically painful to add yourself to the network! (unless you were smart and held a bit of your t-shirt between your hand and the plug). Small request: When you do ping tests maybe you could use 9.9.9.9 instead to help teach people about quad9's non-logging DNS server :)

[@SeithonJetter]

Fun story, when I did training for IT stuff. The standard install method our instructor gave us was to boot off a floppy, format the HDD, copy the entire windows CD to the HDD and then launch the install from the HDD. Fun times :)

[@andrewsuvorow6818]

your old ethernet switch has the internal 50 Ohm dummy load, called terminator. It can be switched on and off, if the slider is set to "internal", you should not attach 50 ohm to the connector at the switch.

[@madnessandescapism]

10Base2 was actually pretty good when it worked. But when it stops working it is absolute nightmare to fix. And also if you have grounding issues with your computers you can get zapped pretty hard when connecting/disconnecting parts of the network. I loved messing with this stuff back in school when I was teenager.

[@mentalplayground]

Nostalgia overload. This was my first proper network. Those Doom multiplayer sessions.

[@hessex1899]

We had HUNDREDS of feet of coax in our hackerspace in the early 90's, all tied together with several DEC DEMPRs. As long as there everything was grounded and terminated it was not too shabby. BTW you should hunt down a Phobos 100mbit ethernet card for your Indigo2.

[@logansorenssen]

Or failing that, a 3c597 EISA card.

[@hessex1899]

@@logansorenssen The GIO64 card has so much more swag, tho. :)

[@AquaFrostByte]

The Vids are so good an chill after school. Just a cool person talking and doing old tech. Awsome just awsome! :3

[@bluefoxtv1566]

Brings me back to the early 2000's when i used a coax network for my mom to have internet access in her office.

[@monad_tcp]

21:31 linux corrupted itself, truly 90s experience right there

[@gemedetvideo]

It is quite likely that Norton is correct and the machine is infected with NYB. NYB is a boot sector virus and was quite prolific for a while. It is quite possible that one of the disks you tried in the system previously was infected. That would also explain the crashes you were seeing - at least some of them. Norton can probably restore the boot sector but you may need to boot from rescue media from a cold boot to do it. Or you could use w Windows boot floppy to re-write the boot sector of the hard drive but again you should do it from a cold boot otherwise you may just end up infecting the floppy you boot from.

[@PiddeBas]

Great video, but keep in mind that it's still all Ethernet, ethernet has nothing to do with the cable or interface per se, it's a protocol

[@littlewillie65]

I suppose if I dug around in the basement, I could find some 10base2 stuff. I should have a couple of networking cards and a 5 port hub with a BNC connector on the back (not as sophisticated as the one you're currently using - and smaller). Back in the late 1900s, I started working with my neighbor who had a small business doing networks other small businesses (doctors, dentists, and lawyers mostly). He also partnered up with a dial-up ISP to provide a site for the hardware to serve our local phone system. He let me run a 10base2 cable from his house to mine, as long as I promised not to eat up too much bandwidth (hence the hub with both ethernet and coax). Ahh, good times...

[@kevinf92]

I used to work on a IBM token ring setup for a cash register/point of sale system. It was - s l o w -, and not only was it slow, but it was slower the farther away(distance) from the controller the terminals were located. Also, instead of terminators, each register was the termination-so just like this-if you unplugged any one, it took the whole system down. I don't miss it.

[@smakfu1375]

FYI Ethernet (as originally defined in 802.3) is the framing standard whereas 10Base5, 10Base2 and 10BaseT through 10GBaseT are all media layers and physical signaling implementations used by Ethernet. Twisted pair RJ45 connected cabling doesn’t make it Ethernet.

[@nilswegner2881]

Adding to this, later token ring equipment switched from the previous proprietary connectors and cables to twisted Pair with RJ45 as well. Having the presenter constantly mess this up and the obvious blunder with the 1.25 Megabytes a second made this video painful to watch.

[@htpc002Weirdhouse]

As one who fixed a thinnet plant with this defect: Don't randomly pick 50 Ohm or 75 Ohm coax for each cable... You'll have many difficult to diagnose problems...

[@imark7777777]

But they're all black there's no difference........... hahaha!

[@studioxxswe]

I think the term is termination just like with an SCSI bus. Your switch have an internal terminator and is used (there is even a switch for it on the right side of the BNC) so removing the terminator would make no difference. Coalition happens on all networks where a HUB is involved and used CSMA/CD methods - even a 100 Mbit/s network with a hub have conflicts. I thin you also mentioned that connecting two computer directly to each others will not work - it will work perfectly and was the way back in the days you you'd played games.

[@iscariotproject]

this how we laned back in the day...using ipx and coax...even ran the cables outside the building since we where all neighbors...also just do a fdisk repair on the mbr...also does the aptiva have a restore partition for factory reset?

[@jeroenvermiljoen]

Back in the BBS days 10BASS-T was my handle because I was cool like that.

[@JonathanSwiftUK]

10base5, thicknet, generally went up the building, though a riser, with taps, often called vampire taps, with a transceiver, which then connected to the 10base2 for that floor. You might have bridges which could connect multiple 10base2 networks, before accessing the thicknet, if you had multiple classrooms on a floor, each with their own thinnet segment. Definitely earlier cards were a pain, you had to set DMA and IRQ via jumpers.

[@sarajackson5795]

Commented and subbed. Hope you keep doing your thing

[@RandomTechWZ]

Vintage networking is almost more interesting than the PCs themselves!

[@romeovoigt]

You have to love the astolfo figure in back

[@w9gb]

Bob Metcalf began the Network with Xerox PARC. Did you know that it started with 1 MB Speed ? Bob’s work led to 3-Com Corporation. 10-Base-5 and 10-Base-2 is ETHERNET, I was using 3-Com 10-Base-2 in 1983 with “new IBM PCs” (8088 4.77 MHz) The File Server we used was an Altos 986 (8086 10 MHz)

[@tonybush4615]

ProTip from a dinosaur and building on your advice of copying your Windows installation CD to the hard drive... If you use DOS to copy the disc to your hard drive into a folder such as C:\WIN98 or C:\WIN95 and then run Setup.exe from that folder, it will never even ask for the disc. It will just automatically pull from the .cab files stored in the folder from where you ran setup.

[@cocusar]

for the missing files that win98 asks you on every single new device installation, what you need to do is copy all the cabs to c:\windows\options\cabs (create if necessary)

[@XDymeStarX]

Funny to see you working on that. as a side note : Just copy the cab files from the win98 cd and set the windows setup location to the new folder in the register. With the command winipcfg you can see the nic information. Thanks for the video.

[@solomongrundysfoot]

Wave reflection on a transmission line is a helluva thing.

[@BestSpatula]

10Base-2 *is* Ethernet.

[@nilswegner2881]

Exactly. Made this video extremely hard to watch.

[@coreymartin9630]

Good thing we don't have to deal with this anymore, terminating cat cable is a breeze compared to this

[@cdkw2]

banger intro! 2:04

[@AO554]

Time to make a really cursed intranet with 10Base2 and IP over Avian Carriers 💀 Congrats on 50K mate!

[@wskinnyodden]

Hah, used a lot of coax! By the time we started moving to RJ45 I repurposed some cabling to use from my 1st floor to my neighbour on the 3rd (replacing a serial cable that would not go over 9600bps and jumping to 10Mbps just like that)

[@jensschroder8214]

That was the real Windows 98 experience. At that time I switched from Amiga to Win98. After being annoyed with it for half a year, I switched to Windows 2000. Then to Win XP and than to Win 7.

[@svenwlive]

these videos actually teach me quite a bit about computing history. thank you ionic1k 😊

[@truectl]

Problem with this approach is that much of the information in this video is factually incorrect. Be careful with what you "learn" from random KZbin videos.

[@svenwlive]

@truectl bruh. at least i learn about the history.

[@VSteam81]

this was very interesting. hope you get the 4th computer up and running!

[@toasted_coffee]

Great video! Thanks for making it

[@ivanmaglica264]

Dude, are you sure you don't have a virus on that Aptiva? Just a thought...

[@cameronbosch1213]

"...But what would happen if I add another radio to the mix transmitting on the same frequency?" *Skynet noises.* Me: _That makes sense to me!_

[@Lurmog]

Nice SDR++

[@luluwuchann]

now time for a docsis network :3

[@Sugarhil1Adot]

Keep up with the good videos bro! 🙂❤️

[@ivanmaglica264]

We used to have 10Base2 around our house until 2001. God forbid you started burning CD and someone else accessed server. Another frisbee...

[@timmooney7528]

I collected a bunch of coax ethernet stuff (T's, cables) they were throwing out at work, then someone else scrapped it before I could bring it home. I have a hub with a coax connection plus some cards with coax jacks

[@davidroddini1512]

If you take the termination off, packets get lost? Do they fall out of the cable? 😜

[@coreymartin9630]

Actually the opposite, the unterminated end acts like a mirror and reflects the signals back into the cable which wreaks all sorts of havok

[@すどにむ]

It applies to wide range of buses and frankly physical phenomenon. You have to have a resistor bridging positive and negative wire to stop reflections happening where impedance changes discontinuously

[@Codeaholic1]

Hit up dmesg if a network card doesn't show in Linux. The driver will output some info. Also ifconfig -a may show the interface if it's unconfigured

[@marcositenmaluda567]

watching this video feeling like you live in early 2000

[@HomeBrewingAndShiLikeThat]

Please make more vidoes!!! You should get an iMac G3 PowerPC, you'll like it and it's super fun to use. JUST MAKE MORE VIDEOS PLEASE!!!

[@B5OD]

21:41 percussion method fixes everything for sure

[@hw2508]

1:11 Baseband does not mean that only one packet can be send at a time. What about 10GBase-T? Baseband (in contrast to broadband) is the "natural" frequency range of the signal. In broadband the information (or signal) is modulated into a different frequency range. That is what Base means. FM Radio is where the frequency of your voice is modulated into the FM frequency range. It is in the name: modulation. The frequency of your radio station is the carrier wave. (FM radio is in a certain way "multiplexing", because there are different radio stations on different frequencies.) So, in 10BaseT (or 5 or 2) the frequency range of the signal is not changed. The signal is not modulated onto a lets say 104.5 MHz carrier wave.

[@tekvax01]

FUNFact: They are not called dump loads, they are 50-ohm terminating resistors.

[@drtweak87]

So how are the Capacitors in that Dimension lol surprised its still running. Well it was mostly the Clam Shell ones where the caps died. The normal desktop ones like that would run longer. But very cool video. I remember as a kid wondering WTH those BNC connectors were and i used to think the other port was a Game Port hahahaha

[@zaxchannel2834]

Riva TNT2 was my first GPU :)

[@nilswegner2881]

The TNT2 is not a GPU. The first GPU was the GeForce 256.

[@sebastian19745]

What if you really have a virus? Have you tried to check the HDD with a modern antivirus? And to rewrite the MBR I guess booting from a clean boot floppy and run fdisk/mbr would erase ant boot virus

[@cameronbosch1213]

26:43 "If you do not have disk management or security softwarer installed, scan *you* computer for viruses." Way to go Microsoft! 😂

[@snap_oversteer]

10BASE5 next?

[@agle_6098]

aah this is the good stuff

[@jvapan]

What is your main OS?

[@RealGengarTV]

I first played doom with some of my friends om a 10base2 network.. also we tried to filesharing via Windows95 (possibly 98).. it was hard to set up for a 14/15 year old

[@domingoburrito]

Giving me some comptia flashbacks lol

[@GegoXaren]

1:10 You are using the wrong units b is for bits. B is for Bytes.

[@lucasio6360]

Where did you find a network switch that supports this? Ive done some looking and they are considerably more expensive than even similar spec modern ones for some reason.

[@Ionic1k]

The hub im using here i found at a thrift store, you can find some on ebay if you search "10BASE hub"

[@OwnedByWuigi]

How did you get your Indigo?

[@shappertallw]

THE BIG MAN

[@Omn1Slash]

27:30 At Norton: "Dude can you f*ck off!" lol yelled that so many times in the 90's at Norton. Absolutely hated that software and it was preinstalled on a ton of retail PC's during the Win 98 era.

[@DeadBaron]

uhoh caught a glimpse of a Fortinet, are you aware of the recent breach? Probably doesn't impact you if that's just for your retro network, but there have been a few events the past few months with Fortinet devices, they are/were compromised.

[@Ionic1k]

I use it only to isolate my windows machine from the rest of my network, I have been aware of the breach and I'm looking in to getting another SFF machine to run OPNSense instead :)

[@mc3d_real14]

do u have a hamradio callsign?

[@Ionic1k]

Yes I do! I don't say my callsign publicly because it leaks my address.

[@mc3d_real14]

@@Ionic1k nice to hear that there are still people doing this... im currently learning to be a licened operator... may be well here there sometime... 73

[@taldmd]

6:34 ping probably requires to be run as root 4:01 that switch next to the BNC connector (Term int/ext) probably allows you to connect the coax straight without the T and the terminator if you have it on the int position. 20:07 you could've configured that linux just using ifconfig and route commands, just enough for the video, no need to reinstall. this is just a guessing comment, totally untested.

[@jfbeam]

TWISTED PAIR (what all the \-T variants use) is not "normal ethernet". And that's not what "baseband" means. Yes, 2 & 5 are a single wire bus and thus fundamentally half-duplex [*], T (twisted pair) uses two pairs -- one for transmit, and one for receive -- so it fundamentally supports full-duplex (tx and rx at the same time), but it took many years for that to be part of the standard. (and hubs to fall out of use) It's a serialized method, so yes, only one frame can be sent at a time. (until you get into higher speeds, and then there are multiple pairs, and with optical media multiple carriers at the same time, and it's still ###-BASE-something) 10base5 thinknet is not "huge". Cable TV distribution cable ("hardline") is much bigger - 0.5" up to 1" diameter. 10base2 thinnet is roughly the same size as common in-home cable TV coax. ('tho some of the lower loss, better shielded stuff is a bit bigger) They're also different impedance than TV cable. [*] Echo cancellation would technically allow two (and only two) nodes to transmit at the same time, but no one else on the wire would be able to make any sense of what's what. (on the wire is A+B. (A+B)-A would allow "A" to clearly see "B". And v.v. for "B", but that's as far as it goes.)

[@vidyajamesu]

i see that astolfo

[@dh2032]

that bit tutching on there at 1:18, a bit frecwancy? Why only the one channel, the basic two cable TV (as television, o' wait, cable was already a two system), and multiple channels all at the same time, and most people were this way better over the air stuff, and paying for it so it might of been something better? So back to the question: why only ever the one frequency is it in a cable, not something else?

[@jameslawrie7517]

Well if you were running just windows boxes you could use netbui and be done maybe ipx if novell somewhere in loop but no idea of tcp/ip on mixed network and 10base2.

[@jfbeam]

Ethernet (layer-2) doesn't care what layer-3 protocols you use. Each has their own ethertype and will happily coexist. I've run networks with DECnet, IPX, IP(v4), and appletalk at the same time.

[@Nicolelovesoldtech]

Hey IONIC, im kinda new into 90s pc gaming, and i snagged a setup fro 35 euros, and i was wondering if it was good. Its a Compaq ep sb, pentium 2, 512MB ram and an FX5200. Is it aly good? I only know the ram is overkill. It can full on play minecraft 1.2 at like 20 fps

[@Jah_Rastafari_ORIG]

Still called "ethernet"... Also, on our repeater we call that interference, "jamming"... We always referred to your "dummy loads" as "terminators". EDIT: disregard, you got it.

[@drenchcoats]

wow mister ionic, didnt know you could do this. ty

[@FirstLast-qp9on]

Pfft. Where's the token ring? Where's the frozen yellow garden hose? Where are the AUIs?! Where's the god damn local talk on RJ11?!?! Now that's retro!

[@allesorialex]

I still have dog slow ethernet at 1.25MB/s😂😂

[@jodynelson2]

10base5 aka 802.3 aka thicknet is the original Ethernet standard. 10base2 aka 802.3a aka thinnet is the 2nd iteration of Ethernet. 10baseT was 802.3i. They are all Ethernet

[@monad_tcp]

19:34 lol, running XServer as root (as if running it as non-root made any difference for security)

[@lachee3055]

bro just say dummy "loads" with that statue on his desk.

[@laureeeeeeeeeeeeeeen]

I cannot count how many times I have typed ls on windows lmao

[@nono-oz4gv]

system location: :3 lol

[@qwerty_studios]

real

[@DeadBaron]

"I love networking" as a networking tech, are you okay? Like, mentally?

[@somedudeonlineidk]

HECK YEAH, COOL S### JUST DROPPED!

[@michaelcloutier2225]

Thie is a sick and Masochistic video. I had to install that crap for for 10 years and Service it for 20. It's absolute garbage. It was the bane of my existence. Some schmuck would put their foot underneath the desk and kick off one of the connectors and kill the entire network. There NO WAY to know where the back is ecept to Crawl around on your knees and check every bloody computer. I did get paid for it, but still it was tedious as hell. It's a stupid system. Sometimes someone would yank the cable and tear the the connectors off the back of the computer. or snap off the connector on the network card. It took way to long to convince my Customers to spend the money and switch to Ethernet. Oh yeah. It was also slow as hell. And it was never gonna get any faster.