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My new workplace has a maintenance yard for the regional cable company behind it and several times now I've seen a few meters of appropriately sized coax go to the dumpster in the alley. I don't think they'll mind me dumpster diving for network cable.
If I can get two taps I wanna see if I can get creative.
Heh, that can probably be arranged. While RG-214 or RG-8 can be used in a pinch for thicknet backbone cable, true ethernet cable has the allowable tap points clearly marked on the orange jacket. I can get pics; we have at least a quarter-mile of the stuff here with taps and AUI drops intact. Make sure you have the proper terminators, and that one end is properly grounded. I might have a tap kit here somewhere.....
I cut my networking teeth on installing the NIC and drivers on DOS machines, using 3Com 3C501, 3C503, 3C505, 3C507, and 3C509 cards back in the early 90's. The factory for which I worked quickly ran out of legal tap points and started using Cabletron's MT-800 Multiport Transcievers (see:
http://www.dilette.com/main/dilettesales/Cabletron_MT-800.html ) to get eight workstations on each tap (the MT-800 has eight workstation-facing AUI ports and one backbone-facing AUI port).
Troubleshooting jabbering hosts was a pain, even with the multi-segment design they had.
Up until about two years ago we had one operating thicknet segment with an FOIRL transceiver pair for one particular remote location that we actually wanted to throttle to 10Mb/s. The client using that location finally ponied up the cash to get a 1000Base-SX uplink installed.... Those old FOIRL transceivers were so old that they were using SMA-type fiber connectors.
This site was an early adopter of routing technology in its earlier days, using Proteon 68020-based routers with four AUI ports and an 80Mb/s fiber Pro/NET token-ring backbone. Still have three of the Proteon routers, all the manuals, and three of the Pro/NET-80 modems with their weird non-ST bayonet fiber connectors.....