Tedium - Net Losses 🥅

(via Wikimedia Commons)

1. Cambridge Ring

Type: Networking hardware

Date first created: 1974

Still in use? No

The 1970s were an unusual time for local area networking, as the concept was still brand new. And that meant that many formative efforts, such as the Cambridge Ring network, were developed by universities rather than companies.

The University of Cambridge, while perhaps less heralded today for its technical work, helped develop some of the earliest efforts at networked operating systems, including the Cambridge Distributed Computing System, an early network operating system that allowed for easy access to central servers.

Cambridge Ring was effectively one of the first LAN systems ever created, and inspired the industry’s growth during the decades that followed.

(via Wikimedia Commons)

4. Token Ring networking

Type: Networking hardware

Date first created: 1985

Still in use? Unlikely

You know how Firewire came out of the gate at significantly faster speeds than USB, only for USB to eventually lap it in future generations? That’s kind of what happened with token ring networking, an IBM-developed networking standard that competed directly with Ethernet during the late 1980s and 1990s.

Inspired directly by Cambridge Ring’s approach, researchers from IBM in Europe developed a networking technology that Big Blue eventually offered up as a standard. At first, token ring was faster than Ethernet, despite having a lower rated speed, because it was more efficient and allowed for larger packet sizes than Ethernet.

“If a computer doesn’t have a token, it has to wait until the token is freed,” TechRepublic contributor John Sheesley wrote in 2008. “This ensures that no two computers can try to access the wire at the same time, making bandwidth usage more efficient.”

However, Ethernet had two fundamental advantages that allowed it to get ahead: One, its cabling was significantly cheaper because IBM wasn’t getting royalties, allowing it to be used in more places; and two, Ethernet quickly leapfrogged the progress Token Ring had made. Soon enough, Token Ring had faded from the conversation for good.

“As we know now, Ethernet won, but if you just looked at the specs, there was no reason why it should have,” Sheesley added.

An example of a GeoPort-compatible modem. (Derek K Miller/Flickr)

7. Softmodem/Winmodem/GeoPort

Type: Networking hardware/modem

Date first created: Early ’90s

Still in use? Probably, somewhere

Anyone who has used a traditional modem from the 1980s knows that they have one specific problem that makes them frustrating to use: Simply put, they feature a speed limit. A 2400-baud modem isn’t going to go any faster than 2400 baud.

Softmodems tried to solve this problem by being developed to utilize digital signal processors (DSPs) instead of dedicated discrete components. This cut down on hardware costs, but it also made modems more upgradeable as they could be kept up to date with quickly improving modern modem speed standards.

That’s the good part. The bad part with softmodems in many Windows devices is that they directly competed for CPU resources at a time the CPU was still relatively slow. (This was later worsened by models of the softmodem that got rid of the DSP entirely, relying only on the CPU, which gained DSP capabilities with the Pentium MMX processor.) Additionally, since they relied on proprietary drivers, softmodems were a nonstarter with many users of open-source software, due to the lack of drivers.

While similar in function to the softmodem approach, the Apple Macintosh’s GeoPort implementation, first introduced with the Quadra 660AV and 840AV models in 1993, had a specific difference that made them functionally different from a softmodem. Basically, Apple included a digital signal processor within the computer itself that a modem could take advantage of, allowing Mac-based modems, while still external, to be smaller and more compact. (When the faster PowerPC architecture was first introduced, it started to utilize the CPU architecture.) However, they suffered from many of the same problems as other softmodems did—in that they slowed down the system and degraded the quality of the modem connections.

In the end, softmodems gained a reputation of being underpowered for the task, even if they could be upgraded to support faster specifications.

This thing used to be my secret weapon against disabled WiFi. (CLEAR)

10. WiMAX

Type: Large-area wireless networking

Date first created: 2001

Still in use? Specialized use cases

About a decade ago, when I worked out of coffee shops a lot more as a semi-professional blogger, I purchased a CLEAR Spot modem that allowed me access to the internet on the go in an era before smartphone tethering became common.

This modem relied on WiMAX, a wide-area networking specification that could be best described as a combination of Wi-Fi and 4G internet. It wasn’t perfect—I found that CLEAR connections were useful when Wi-Fi wasn’t an option, but it often didn’t work quite so great at times—but it was popular enough that more than 10 million people used it at the technology’s peak in the early 2010s. Eventually, the company—which was owned by a huge number of other companies that invested in municipal internet—was sold off to Sprint, which shut the network down in the years before Sprint’s eventual sale to T-Mobile.

The WiMAX technology is still out there, but as a hint of where it’s being used today, the first image that shows up on the WiMAX Forum website is a picture of an airplane.