[GTALUG] I’m obviously way behind in my reading: IBM owns Redhat

[James Knott]

On 2020-05-27 04:26 PM, Russell Reiter wrote:
> I'm not all that sure it wasn't all that popular for Wide and 
> Metropolitan backbone infrastructure fabrics; finance, rail and 
> automobile signalling and routing come to mind

Funny thing, I have been working with telecom, computers and networks 
for decades, but have never, not once, seen FDDI implemented anywhere.  
On the other hand, I know that the the LRTs in the Toronto area have 
lots of Ethernet over fibre.  For example, on the Finch line, there are 
some 432 strands of fibre, connected to standard switches and routers.  
Another technology that has been used is something called "resilient 
packet ring", which is Ethernet in a ring configuration, for 
redundancy.  I have worked with equipment that supports it.  There was 
also a TDM technology called SONET that was employed in rings.  I have a 
bit of experience with it, from back in my Unitel days.

BTW, my first experience with ring networks was on the Air Canada 
reservation system, when it was at 151 Front St. W..  That system used 
time division multiplexing, rather than packets on a LAN. There were 2 
versions at 8 Mb and 2 Mb.  All the various devices, such as disks, tape 
stands and more were connected to these rings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resilient_Packet_Ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_networking