While your preferred specification is excellent, It’s “an ethernet port” in ordinary usage. Or “ethernet jack” in more technical contexts and entirely sufficient for Ali Express.
> While your preferred specification is excellent, It’s “an ethernet port” in ordinary usage. Or “ethernet jack” in more technical contexts and entirely sufficient for Ali Express.
Right, in your average 2020s home or office, "Ethernet" is almost certainly 8P8C (commonly known as RJ-45). In decades past it was more ambiguous – in the 1990s, coax – ThinNet/10Base2 – was still reasonably common; even the older ThickNet/10Base5 would still occasionally be encountered. So to some extent, being specific is a bit of an "old timer" trait–a habit picked up decades ago when it was still important, now maintained when it is rarely still necessary.
But even in the 2020s – in a factory, it could easily be M12 instead. Or even a mix of both – 8P8C in the offices, but M12 on the factory floor.
Honestly, even in a home environment, I hate how fragile and easily unplugged 8P8C connectors are (the worst part is when they get slightly pulled out, so they still look like they are plugged in, but the connection is dead or flaky). I've thought about using M12 at home before, but it probably wouldn't be very practical.
I did a lot of CAD in the 1990’s, most shops had no network and a computer on every desk. The reasons were simple: capital expense and scarcity of technical expertise. By 2000 it was different because networking was cheaper and the network effect had reached the tipping point where other businesses had email, ftp, etc.
A low to mid spec PC cost around $2000, and an NE2000 clone was around $50. RG-58 coax was about 20 cents a foot from Radio Shack.
Windows for Workgroups made the setup pretty trivial, and there was a plethora of folks out there (like me) repairing PCs and setting up LANs for small businesses.
I was involved in those decisions. The people I worked for knew their businesses and knew the importance of cash flow to it. It had a lot to do with capital.
The simple equation was that setting up a network did not look like it would make those companies money. And in the Windows for Workgroups era, running CAD on Windows was a massive performance hit.
Don’t ignore the capital cost of buying Windows versions of Cad software…potentially thousands of dollars per seat. Don’t ignore the cost of graphics cards…the high performance card might not have Windows drivers and every machine might have a different card bought at a different time.
And don’t ignore the cost of a file server that inspires confidence. In an environment where contracts are five to seven figures, the local PC repair shop is not the most enticing risk.
You don’t need Windows for networking. There was lots of networking software for DOS. NetWare was the most popular, but there were heaps of alternatives: Microsoft/IBM LAN Manager, Banyan VINES, DEC Pathworks, Sun PC-NFS - most of those required a server running some other operating system (such as OS/2, Unix or OpenVMS), but there was also a category of “peer-to-peer” DOS networking software which could operate without a dedicated server, e.g. Artisoft LANtastic, Novell’s NetWare Lite and its successor Personal NetWare
So what it comes down to is: The handful of places you worked in a specific industry didn’t want to spring for some ethernet cards, and so therefore office LANs were uncommon?
They were uncommon because they were uncommon. That’s why there was a business installing them. If they were common nobody would have bought them from you.
Wifi networks are very common today, and yet there are heaps of businesses installing them (and they normally have to install Ethernet at the same time, to connect the access points to the broadband router/modem). The same is true of air conditioners, solar panels, household batteries, rainwater tanks, surveillance cameras, building alarms, fire alarms, fire suppression systems, elevators
Your suggestion that the existence of businesses installing something is evidence the thing is uncommon, is illogical
Not in homes, in institutions (workplaces, schools, universities, government agencies, etc). In the early 1990s, a lot of places were in the process of replacing 10Base2 with 10BaseT, so there was still heaps of 10Base2 installs around. 10Base5 had mostly been replaced wth 10Base2 already, but as with any legacy technology, pockets of it survived initially-in 1992, 10Base5 was only 10 years old, absolutely you would find places still stuck on 10 year old technology. Nowadays? I doubt there is any 10Base5 left anywhere. Maybe, maybe, buried deep inside some super-legacy embedded system, but even that’s dubious.
SneakerNet was far more common in the world were most people actually lived and if there was a digital network there is a good chance it was Novell or Token Ring.
> if there was a digital network there is a good chance it was Novell or Token Ring
As the other commenter pointed out already, the vast majority of Netware networks used Ethernet. I knew what Token Ring was, but I don't think I ever actually saw it, my knowledge of it was purely from books and magazines. My dad's work (a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant) was somewhat of an IBM shop in that their main computer was an AS/400 that ran the whole factory, but I interned in their IT department for two weeks in 1997 (I think I'd just turned 15) and I don't remember seeing any Token Ring, or hearing it even mentioned.
And this is the thing, I was a teenager in the 1990s, I was there. I saw Ethernet (and Acorn Econet too, which is much more obscure). I saw it at my school. I saw it at my dad's work. I remember one of my school friends had Ethernet in his house (not in the walls, they just had 2-3 computers in the family room connected to a hub/switch). I was trying to convince my dad to buy Ethernet cards but he wasn't sold on the idea–he was familiar with it from work (his field was chemistry and pharmaceutical manufacturing not computing, but he was technical enough to know what it was), but at home he was happy with Laplink. We had dial-up Internet before we had Ethernet; we had multiple computers, more than one of them had a modem, and my siblings and I would fight over who would use the dial-up since only one of us could use it at once. I remember around 1998 I was invited to a LAN party at a church, but I didn't go.
"the world were most people actually lived" is a bit meaningless, because then we are talking about what was happening in rural villages in Africa at the time. In the world in which I lived, my 1990s, Ethernet was widespread, first in school/work settings, and by the end of it, it was really taking off in home settings too. Maybe your 1990s were different from mine (different country/geography, different social milieu), or maybe you weren't actually there to experience it firsthand.
I was firmly into adulthood when they began, I worked at ordinary small businesses, and was often involved in technology purchasing decisions.
Where I was working in 1997, I set up the company’s Yahoo email…one address for the whole office which went to the receptionist’s computer. Which was fine because important communication was done by phone or fax and if you needed to reach someone out of their office you probably called their pager…though cell phones were around, most business people could not justify the expense and cell phone culture did not exist yet.
The office moved files with floppy disks via courier or USPS. Backups were to Qic tape and files moved within the office via sneaker net…cd burners were still uncommon, large, SCSI, slow, and expensive. So Zip disks were more common.
To put it another way, I spent all 10 years of the 1990’s using computers for work. It was a very different life.
We lived in different geographies (you were somewhere in the US, I was in Sydney, Australia), being exposed to different types of enterprises: for me a private Catholic high school, and the Australian branch of the global US-headquartered pharmaceutical company for which my father worked.
I suspect your experiences were in part a product of which industry you were in, and which end of that industry - in another comment you mentioned DOS-based CAD software, in the early 1990s some big firms (especially in aerospace, defence, automotive) were still using IBM mainframe-based CAD systems running on IBM 7437s and 5080s (and if you could afford that fiendishly expensive kit, you could afford networking and likely already had it); as the 1990s progressed, mainframe-based CAD increasingly moved to UNIX workstations, for which Ethernet was very standard. And DOS-based CAD software and networking were not mutually exclusive-NetWare worked fine with DOS, and my high school had a CAD lab running the DOS version of Bentley MicroStation (IIRC, the DOS version we used was still branded Intergraph not Bentley), but all the machines were connected to Ethernet and we logged in to them using NetWare. Similarly, at my dad’s work almost all PCs ran Windows 3.x, but there were a few DOS-only machines connected to various pieces of laboratory or manufacturing equipment for which the software was DOS-only (and had issues running under a Windows 3.x DOS box) - and they connected those machines to NetWare too, because NetWare had no problem with DOS-only clients.
