bbs00068@uafcseg.uucp (Joel Kolstad) (09/30/90)
Our office just got a new wiring job, and a dreaded new word has come into my life: Ethernet. Currently, to get our PCs to talk to anything else, we plug a serial cable into the back of the PC, run a nice terminal program such as Procomm Plus, and login to a bigger machine (almost exclusively Unix workstations, right now. Before you actually get to login to a Unix box, there's another machine that you talk to that let's you tell it just WHICH machine you want to use...) Now that the wiring is done, they say we'll be switching over to Ethernet. I need to learn something about Ethernet... specifically what cards we need to buy for the PCs, and how Ethernet cards on PC let you "talk" to other machines. First off, just what is Ethernet? I assume it's just another protocol like RS-232, and you can basically feed the Ethernet card anything you want, right? If so, instead of using a terminal program like we have been, how does one access the data coming in on the Ethernet? Overall, I guess I'm really just very confused. I'd be very happy if someone could tell me the basics of how a PC on an Ethernet network works! Thanks for any help that you people can give me. I really appreciate it! ---Joel Kolstad Reply to: kolstad@cae.wisc.edu