When I started in this industry over 30 years ago (no tin can and string jokes please), there was 1 kind of cable; 4 conductor 24AWG non- twisted. This was called quad cable. There wasn’t a plenum or non-plenum flavor and there were only 2 colors; beige and olive green. Oh it was a much simpler time. Cables were run across the ceiling, no need to number them, we will buzz them out and label the jacks and 66 blocks later, and all the jacks were surface mount biscuit style. Everything was a single line analog phone. If it was a multi-line key set, a minimum of 25 pair was run to the location. And if there were a lot of key sets, you had to figure out the (cringe) ringing matrix. There wasn’t even any data at that time. Little did we know how quickly, and often, things were going to change.
Quad cable was briefly replaced with a 3 pair, somewhat twisted cable, and then with 4 pair twisted cable. Networks hit the scene and the broad band bus configuration was the way to go. Electronic multi-line telephones arrived and everyone was rewiring everything. It was a great time to be a wiring contractor!! And then it happened, the breakthrough that would change the world of networking forever…the Controller, or Hub, and star configuration. Each device could now have its own cable back to the wiring closet. Now, as a contractor, our job just got easier because the voice and data cables were running to the same place. A huge labor saver.
It started with RG59 cable with BNC connectors. Voice cables were still using 3 pair. Now safety codes were enhanced and plenum cable was an option. This network configuration was the standard for a long time. There were other configurations, some people still used the bus, and others were using the ring topology, but the star was king. Let’s not forget the twin coaxial, or twinax, applications. IT directors were ecstatic. They could get as shared 10 Mbs signal on their network. All the closets were connected with coax cable and if they needed to contact other networks outside of their building, there were modem banks in the server rooms, sometime with tens of 14400 modems, hooked up to analog telephone lines. Technology was here and it was screamin’!!
And then, the inevitable. The engineers started playing with twisted pair and structured cabling was born. We’ll pick up on this next week.
Until next time…
