Econet LAN
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Econet was a proprietary local area network used on Acorn computers. It was introduced on the Acorn Atom computer in about 1984, and became popular for classroom networks.
Electrically, the network was a serial bus carried on two pairs of wires (one pair for data, the other for the clock), with a maximum length of 500 metres. Unshielded cable was used for short lengths, and shielded cable for longer networks. The cable was terminated at each end to prevent reflections and to guarantee high logic levels when the bus was undriven. A clock generator (up to 200 kilohertz) was fitted in the centre of the network cable. Signalling was to the RS-422 5-volt differential standard, with one bit transfer per clock cycle. The original connectors were five-pin circular 180° DIN types, although some later Acorn RISC machines had 15-pin D-types.
Each Econet interface was controlled by a Motorola MC6854 Advanced Data Link Controller (ADLC) chip. Each station had a unique hard-wired eight-bit ID.
Network bridges, in the standard "cheese wedge" box, were available for building large networks.
Ecolink
An "Ecolink" interface card for IBM PCs was available. It used Microsoft's MS-NET Redirector for MS-DOS to provide file and printer sharing with the NET USE command.
Quotation
"We showed Bill Gates the Econet network and he said 'What's a network?'"
- -- Hermann Hauser (Acorn co-founder), 1982 [1] (http://web.archive.org/web/20030815173028/www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~mafl/acorn.php3)