alt Hacker NewsWe used to love token ring style networks (specifically ARCNET) for playing Doom, Descent and Quake back in the day. ARCNET was more annoying to set up and had thicker cables, but it was rock-solid reliable afterwards. Totally bulletproof.
In comparison to that, traditional ethernet (think concentric cabling and terminators) glitched often and one flaky part of a cable could ruin your day.
ARCNET was much slower in theory, but robust, fair and stable and did not totally die under load from a single client.
People may forget that Ethernet originally had a shared transmission medium and collisions were a serious limitation. Switching was a later addition that mostly solved collisions and really paved the way for Ethernet as we know it today.