Wow that was a blast from the past! It’s been a while since I’ve thought seriously about token ring LANs vs Ethernet. When I first started learning networking back in the 90s, Ethernet was already dominating corporate & enterprise LANs.

During that time, I was working in a school computer lab and learning about networking. Like all schools back then, we had a large lab of Macs and a separate and smaller lab of PCs running NT workstation.

I remember coming in one early morning when the lab was empty and entered into the networking closet and all the LED lights were lighting up blinking like crazy, which seemed odd since the lab was empty.

I later learned that it was AppleTalk, which was Apple’s proprietary protocol for auto-discovery of Apple devices on the network. It was an extremely chatty protocol. We disabled it on each Mac, and students noticed that the computers seem to run faster: probably from loading network drives or browsing the internet.

Fun times.