In the 80's and 90's, before wireless networking became prominent and ethernet, especially 10base_ was the norm, how did corporations with dispersed offices (where the offices represent separate segments on the unique lan), geographically, connect to the only ethernet lan where the administrator wants a single lan that has a gateway with a straight link to the internet? I believe my conjecture is practical. from a practical point of view, this question refers to, if i want dispersed offices, that is say, two ends of a city, but a single lan, is this possible without creating a wan (or N lans) and a high-speed central link for the wan? how, in a world without wireless?

Most geographically dispersed stuff was accessed via modems using analog phone lines. One used cu or something akin to it for command line sessions and uucp for file transfers on *NIX systems. PCs had various tools to do things over modem that relied on things like Kermit.

TCP/IP in fact was an add-on product on SCO UNIX back when I first started working on it the early 90s - you didn't get it or X-Windows with the base install. Modems got progressively faster (we had started with 300 baud and went up to 28800 baud) modems by the time I'd left that job in the mid 90s. You could do faster things such as T1 lines or ISDN (the joke was ISDN stood for "It Still Does Nothing) which was sort of a precursor to DSL.

Some companies (with lots of money) did WAN over satellite. We worked with one large client that had all of their clients using satellite and token ring (which is when we started buying the TCP/IP package and a token ring card). Telnet was horrible over satellite. 1/4 second doesn't sound like a long time but in duplex mode where it would echo every character back to you from the remote site just typing 10 letters was maddening. You had to set it to half-duplex so it only sent after you hit return and hope you didn't have a typo.

1 members found this post helpful.

It used wireless only in some odd places. Legal reasons and bandwidth were not available. The entire world relied on wired like token ring and POTS and twisted pair wires.

I did use satellite, uhf, ehf, hf, lf and vlf to send encrypted 400, 1200, and 2400 baud data over the air in the military.

There is a whole list of older means like banyon vines, arcnet, Novell, and decnet. Many of those protocols are still in use and still working.

1 members found this post helpful.

thanks. interesting.