Please correct me if I’m wrong, might have breathed in too many soap fumes.
Token Ring sends the packets to every node by passing it from one node and if that node is not the recipient it passes it on to the next node.
Memos were created the day before with a list of recipients then it was passed around till everyone on the list had read it.
The whole point behind it was that everything was too slow to handle it efficiently themselves in an uncontrolled manner. When networks and computers got faster we started using ethernet.
The whole point was that cs/ma (check if anyone is talking while you’re talking) was a competing strategy to token ring (everyone can talk in their turn).
You could lose most of your bandwidth under contention with csma, it scaled poorly and routers/switches were crazy expensive because they needed to have memory to buffer packets at full flow.
Somebody made an integrated switch ASIC and the price plummeted and suddenly every network was switched.
Yes, and it’s also that switches got cheaper so most new installations only connect two nodes with a single physical conductor.