Back in my salad days of networking back in the late 1980s and 1990s, it was still very much a multi-protocol World:   Source Route Bridging (SRB), Source Route Translational Bridging (SRTLB) and Synchronous Network Architecture (SNA) were common.    ARCnet was still around and Ethernet cable “vampire taps” were still being used.   The Ethernet versus Token Ring LAN wars had not yet been won, with many businesses and financial institutions still opting for the determinism of Token Ring.  Token Ring LAN switching was emerging and the High Speed Token Ring Alliance (HSTRA)  was formed in 1997 to provide a multi-vendor alliance against the emerging (and cheaper) Ethernet-based LAN solutions.      VLANs were something new !   X.25 WANs (branded as DPN-100 by Northern Telecom) were, again, preferred by businesses and financial institutions, given the circuit was a connection-oriented, packet-switched protocol.   Connectionless WAN protocols like Frame Relay were just becoming proven and popular.   When I worked at IBM Network Hardware Division (NHD), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) appeared to be the Holy Grail to unit both the WAN and LAN realms :   IBM NHD developed and promoted their ATM LAN Emulation (ATM LANE) solution based on their IBM 8210 Multiprotocol Switched Services (MSS) Server, 8265 ATM Switch and 8272 Token Ring Switch with ATM uplink card.   The Year 2000 Problem, or Y2K as it was known, was a looming and ominous threat.    New Year’s Eve in 1999 was tinged with dread of a World crashing down due to myriad computer problems with year data shown only as 2 digits.  I literally only ever saw just ONE example of this in a harmless log.  The World survived !   But, I digress … It has been a great and wonderful ride !   While the trivia of the past may be interesting, the promise of future technologies like quantum-based computers and networking is far more interesting !     Cheers … Brian Carlson, P.Eng.   What a Ride !! ... View more