Discussion on:

Does anyone actually still USE Token Ring?

As I mentioned in Classics Rock,

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/classic-tech/?p=115

one of the big technology battles in the 80's and 90's was that of Token Ring vs. Ethernet. Arguably Token Ring should have won from a technical perspective, but IBM priced it out of the market.

We used Token Ring at the Jefferson County Police Department, but that was after a bid on a network that IBM won. Outside of large organizations, I don't think you'll run into Token Ring anymore nor do I think anyone's doing any new Token Ring installations.

Anyone out there still using it?

I haven't seen any in the past five years here in the states.

So I guess my Network General Sniffer Token-Ring adapter, my IBM Redbook on Token-Ring, and my 'Type 1 cable tester' need to be buried at sea?

Ahhh the joys of beaconing, the thrill of going from 4MB to 16MB, the IBM 'boy george' connectors. Don't get me started about getting the right adf file for the IBM MicroChannel 16/4 adapter and using DXMA0MOD.SYS......

Surprisingly, Madge still makes the stuff....

Aside from descriptive slides in my college Infrastructure classes. I understand how it works but i'd probably fail horribly if i had to work on one

The only place Token Ring seems to survive is in the text book and in Certification Exams. Maybe it's on the outside chance a network administrator runs across it in a larger institution, but other than that, I don't see a reason to be discussing it.

The exams are why it is still in the textbooks. I'm at ITT grad myself, and we hit upon it briefly with each networking course, but we never picked it apart. It was treated the same way as vacuum tubes and punch cards, really.

A bit late in replying, but I am currently working on a system which is based on a Token-Ring network. The system is large and old - I'm unwilling to expose which system for commerical confidence reasons, however, if a system was introduced many years ago and is saftey critcal the saftey approach is - if it aint broke dont fix it!

Well, I've been doing this a while (my first code was Fortran on punchcards but it's been about 20 years since I last wrote any Fortran, I use other languages nowadays). Never actually seen a Token Ring network though once upon a time I heard of them...

UPS was slowly transitioning to Ethernet in the early '90s. This is a company that held on to OS/2 well after everyone else shelved it. And that's only because they followed Gartner's advice.

I'll never forget when I heard they wanted IBM to hack the TCP/IP stack for OS/2 for some obscure reason.

Eventually, UNIX, Ethernet and Windows took over there but not without a fight.

As of about six years ago when they sold us at least parts of IBM were still using Token Ring.

After the sale we changed buildings and for a while some of lost are cubes and were working out of a conference room, Token Ring PC Cards were a hot item!

Token Rings are still in use by system developers requiring time and/or security sensitive communications. Ethernet protocols, before IPv6, have not provided the necessary guarantee to keep that aircraft in the sky or ensure the COCOMs are able to maintain secure communications. Since few commercial communication product providers are supporting IPv6 yet, token rings will remain until guaranteed on-time, no-loss message delivery is available via IP.

NT

Herb

It was a decent sized job in a place that makes Electrical Generation Equipment for the Power Generation Industry.

All their manufacturing equipment is Computer Controlled and uses the Token Ring System. Works a treat as well I might add even if they are effectively using DOS for all the Manufacturing side of the business.

There the Token Ring remains Totally Divorced from the Ethernet Network and they are more than happy with it. I don't think any of the Computer Controlled Equipment even comes with Ethernet as a option.

Col

We recently moved our office and did some house cleaning in the process. We tossed a few new still in the box MAU's and type 1 cable. We hadn't installed any of this for at least 9 years. I have visited many different facilities and haven't seen any token ring out there recently.

How many companies still have thin-net , cheaper-net - RG58 coax, This cable was every where 15 years ago, it also was a pain if not installed properly and most of it wasn't. 95% of the issues with this cable was the connectors not installed properly and help desk telling the end user to wiggle the connector. This was a cheap way to wire a network 15 to 20 years ago.

I've seen an MAU exhibition at the The National Science Museum of Tokyon, pretty impressive...LoL

for the steamship.

sorry, in the case of travel, Luxury beats speed for me.

I taught myself networking using a token ring.

6 systems, two of which were working as MAUs. [one for fail over. ]

you know what's odd, I think I still have some old ethernet cards with tokenring support, including the connectors

I think you answered your own question. The reason it is still taught, is because it is still in use in some large orginizations (that in turn have lots of employees) that spent millions to put it in place. So consiquently, a student should still know the basics when they hit the job market and potentially get a job working for one of the said large orginizations.

Perhaps, but I wonder at this point if many of the large corporations that initially bought Token Ring years ago still have it around. I would suspect over time the vast majority of it has been ripped out and replaced, especially as new workstations have been introduced.

I can't see many businesses investing in Token Ring cards and going to the time and trouble to install them when so many new workstations come with Ethernet on-board. I would have thought that IT would rip out the MAUs instead and put in switches. Especially if they were already running CAT 5.

I know of at least three government agencies (state and local) that were still using Token Ring as of three years ago. The primary hindrance to converting to Ethernet was a combination of bureaucratic inertia (it works, why change it?) and funding (It's going to cost how much?).

The friends I had in those agencies have since moved on, so I don't know if they are still using Token Ring or have moved to Ethernet. I know the last of them finally converted from IPX to IP networking in 2006.

Edit: punctuation

Yes, that's pretty much what happened where I worked. I'd spent two years perfecting a fully redundant Token-Ring configuration on a large chemical site, only to rip it out and replace it with Ethernet a year later. Why?

- Every new PC came with a Fast Ethernet adapter installed.
- None of the new PCs had ISA slots to take the old T-R cards
- A new PCI T-R card cost almost as much as the PC itself
- It was impossible to buy internal T-R network interfaces for printers, and the external boxes cost more than the printer did.
- The cost to buy new Fast Ethernet switches was less than the cost of maintenance on the T-R kit
- I was able to remote manage the new switches properly, saving money in travelling expenses going to site

On a big SAP rollout at the site, it actually worked out less expensive to replace the estate than maintain the status quo.

It all got ripped out and replaced in late 2003, and was the last of the T-R sites I dealt with.

The fact that the switches has Spanning Tree as well meant I could even factor in redundant fibre links using the spare pairs that were released by the T-R infrastructure, and meant that all the benefits of T-R were now covered by Ethernet. The only hard part was getting them to coexist!

You are brillant John Sheesley, very good answer

ITT Tech has books with words in them. ITT Tech also has dry erase boards and several colors of dry erase markers. They even have chairs for the students to sit in. It must be a real school capable of providing marketable skills. I hope those ITT Educational Inc. MBAs are right; we all go to heaven no matter how much pain we cause in this world.

I remember as an electrician making the twin axial ends off...gold to spot I think.

Token Ring lost out to Ethernet primarily on cost. The Token Ring NIC required a high level of functionality, all cards had to be capable of running the ring and its management functions and was always more expensive that Ethernet. Ethernet was simpler and thus cheaper. Token Ring worked well in SNA environments with mainframes but the introduction of distributed systems and TCP/IP lead to the demise of SNA. The capacity advantage of Token Ring was negated the introduction of LAN switches and higher speed Ethernet

Great article and a nice trip down memory lane. I have taught similar classes at ITT Tech campus and enjoyed reliving my networking youth.

One comment on the idea that token ring makes "bandwidth usage more efficient". The efficiency of either Token Ring or Ethernet is directly related to the type of usage of the network, not those specific technologies. The operational difference is that Token Ring is deterministic, while Ethernet is not.

I remember considering using Token Ring instead of Ethernet back in the late 80s when I found the building already wired with twin-ax cables because the company used IBM System 38s. I also remember finding an ArcNet network running in Department of Commerce in 1988. And I worked on thicknet Ethernet until 1996 at the DOJ. Does anybody else remember "vampire clamps" for thick Ethernet cables? Plus I briefly taught at ITT. Deja vu! Been there, done that.

Switching and 100mbps Ethernet kind of resolved most of the problems we had with Ethernet. But, as is so often the case in technology, the problems aren't resolved in elegant fashion. We take a fundamentally unstable software platform like Windows and throw faster CPUs and more memory at it. With networks, we throw more bandwidth at the problem even though we use it very inefficiently. Thankfully, Ethernet is a little more stable than 32 bit Windows.

The market doesn't always favor elegance and sometimes brute force and simplicity win over a more "elegant" solution. Betamax, Token Ring, QEMM-386, DR DOS. The market is full "better" products that didn't last.

I don't know if the guy was pulling my leg, but a friend told me his military-industrial complex "skunk works" office uses token ring. He said is was less prone to EMP interference originating from the outside, (aka "attack") and is harder to sniff with advanced techniques like reading EMP spewing outward generated in various parts of the hardware.

But from other appearances I've gotten from this guy over the years, I'd sooner believe it's purely "it works, why spend money to replace it?" at work here.

Does your friend have a tinfoil hat also?

At the mac layer, Token Ring is no better or worse than Ethernet from either a EMP or Van Eck style attack. The 'security through obscurity' argument does not hold water.

A strong EMP is gonna bonk anything that uses digital circuitry, whatever the topology.

Yes, I'll admit that since an old MAU or CAU only has relays, so they could probably work during a nuclear attack.....

Some Military Contractors have a lot of legacy stuff, and their 'feast or famine' funding model leads to some really weird infrastructure.

Yeah, this guy is a real character. He's always yanking my chain, which he does brilliantly because he's a first percentile genius.

He's got some kind of 'clearance,' so I should assume e's never going to tell me anything accurate about what's going on in the facility. So I insist anyway and he gives me hooey like that to get me off his back... yep

Next time I'll assume the opposite of what he tells me. I did suspect they were using token ring because it's been long paid for and plain works.

Well, some cables used with TR were STP with a braided shield. In theory, this might have provided some protection against some kind of EMP. But, unless the entire facility was hardened protecting the cables won't do much good. And hardening a building and everything in it is a bit expensive.

If he has clearance he shouldn't be telling you ANYTHING about the inside of his buildings, networks or computers. That is just common sense.

I worked for United Parcel Service in there Technical Support Group and up until a year ago everything was ran on Tokenring 4/16mgbt. Using CAU, MAU, and LAM's or as we called it, "The Farm". Using Tokenring as opposed to Ethernet was a little more challenging if you didn't have the proper mapping directory. If a node went out you would hear a clicking sound from the CAU or MAU which meant that the next node was not able to accept the token from the previous node. This may sound like a simple task but when your running over a 900 nodes in 1 center connected to a series of MAU's, CAU's and LAM's you have a full day of trace routing. With the switch to Ethernet, the time to locate the proper node to troubleshoot the issue dramatically decreased and the effciency of the network dramatically increased. Was there ever competition with Tokenring and Ethernet? I think not, we praised the conversion and laugh at IT horror stories about being on the farm. Tokenring although great in simplicity at times was a little too simple, especially when you apply it to networks on a larger scale. May IBM's Tokenring RIP as we move towards better network topography's

The local A&P used IBM based POS equipment. It was token ring. I remember working one night where they had to break the ring to remove a register; the techs were sweating it hoping that the ring would come back after they cut the wires...

Used broken ring a lot in the day when there was PS/2 out there too. AS/400 was another dino that held on to it for me. Since about 1993 I have not seen it. The cheap alternative - 4 pair ethernet ... could not bother buying so much gear.

I worked with testing 100 mb token ring in a 24 story building. first 12 floors were 1000mb ethernet and the rest were HSTR, the speed difference was amazing the HSTR was noticibly faster for everything. We had some secure data breeches with employees bringing in their own ethernet wireless routers.Eventually they converted the building to HSTR and the system was secured....they were using it until last year when they contracted HP to upgrade and maintain the network and they completely rewired the highrise to 1000mb ethernet. A friend that works at the building let me know they have had lots of headaches and network downtime since the transition.