But just because Ethernet uses coax doesn’t mean it’s normally good enough to carry most TV-like signals. It is just baseband in capacity. You’d normally use Ethernet simply for computerlike messages or maybe some telephone; it’s like a single, high-speed highway.
Wangnet, however, is broadband and can carry TV. It resembles a whole transportation network—a highway, air corridors, and a river.
You have many well-separated channels. In fact, Wangnet is piping along signals at radio and TV frequencies. And the right gadgetry can separate them just as easily as a good television does. You can go for miles with Wangnet—much farther than with Ethernet, which may need signal boosters after several thousand feet.
People at Wang, Xerox, and the others can get truculent and maybe even paranoid about their pet networks versus their rivals’.
“There is no light at the end of the tunnel yet,” said a friend of mine who’s a systems analyst. “Everyone is looking over everyone else’s shoulder to see what they’re doing.” And it isn’t just the computer industry. The PBX[[81]] makers, the switchboard manufacturers, want their shares of the action, too. This works the other way, too. IBM in 1984 said it would make Rolm—a major PBX maker—part of the Big Blue empire.
Room exists, of course, for many styles of networks—even in the same companies in some cases.
Bigelow aptly likens networks to word processors. We don’t all use WordStar; why should we all be on Ethernet?
With the right hardware, in fact, a twisted pair or maybe even a bus network might merge with the baseband and broadband ones. Networked second- or even third- or fourth-hand micros might speak to mainframes. The state of West Virginia in 1984 planned to buy hundreds of IBM computers. Many reportedly would be on Omninets. As of mid-1984 an Omninet could have only sixty-three micros on it—but why not link many Omninets to big-time networks? A man at Corvus assured me that’s exactly what his company was working on for customers like West Virginia. AT&T may have had the right idea. It planned a network to work with Ethernet and Corvus, plus the RS-232-style arrangement that you already use to hook up computers with printers and modems.
That could be just the solution for some large companies that feel they’re just innocent civilians in the network wars.
Meanwhile, if you’re with a small company like Carsonville Metal Products, home in on your immediate needs. Again, don’t worry about high-powered networks designed for the Fortune 500 crowd. Maybe all computers someday will work with Ethernet, say, and perhaps it’ll be just as cheap for you as a WEB-style net, but it isn’t now. Meanwhile, if an Ethernet-equipped firm wants to talk to your computers today, there’s already a network in place with fairly common technical standards: the telephone system.