Incidentally, it was the same signal that ran on 10base5 with the vampire taps.
At the lab I hung out in as an undergrad, someone found what was termed "the connector of evil." On one end it looked like a thinnet terminator and on the other it looked to be a thicknet terminator - but they didn't terminate, it was a pass through.
And we used it. Some of the machines had 10b5 connectors and some had 10b2. The ones that used 10bT were at the other end of the room where the hub was.
The fun part was tracking down the inevitable "that machine dropped off the net" because the standing wave wasn't quite right for the thicknet side (and made the thinnet side unhappy too).
So we set it up to do a ping -f of an IP on the subnet that was on the 10bT side and redirect it to /dev/audio. This way machines that were on the net had speakers that were chipping away while those that had fallen off were silent. And then we'd go about swapping lengths of coax to get the standing wave to establish again when everything was chirping away... until we had to add another machine.
in the mid-90s i was invited to fix several schools' networks, a couple were novell and i forget what the others were (edit: also appletalk, which was similar but used 2 pairs on "telephone jacks", including little phone jack resistors), and those BNC connectors (or were they TNC?) were connected to stiff wires so any movement of the very heavy PCs connected to them tended to shear solder joints. I even had to replace "thinnet" coax that rats had eaten through.
I bet if i open my parts cabinet i still have enough stuff to build a token ring 10base2 network right now.
At the lab I hung out in as an undergrad, someone found what was termed "the connector of evil." On one end it looked like a thinnet terminator and on the other it looked to be a thicknet terminator - but they didn't terminate, it was a pass through.
And we used it. Some of the machines had 10b5 connectors and some had 10b2. The ones that used 10bT were at the other end of the room where the hub was.
The fun part was tracking down the inevitable "that machine dropped off the net" because the standing wave wasn't quite right for the thicknet side (and made the thinnet side unhappy too).
So we set it up to do a ping -f of an IP on the subnet that was on the 10bT side and redirect it to /dev/audio. This way machines that were on the net had speakers that were chipping away while those that had fallen off were silent. And then we'd go about swapping lengths of coax to get the standing wave to establish again when everything was chirping away... until we had to add another machine.