The only way Token Ring could have ruled the world was if it was developed outside IBM. Instead it came out of the same corporate cultural moment that birthed MCA and the PS/2 line and APPC over SNA (to rival, sort of, GOSIP and TCP/IP).
IBM Networking Systems spent much of the early 1990s dithering and thrashing about how to compete with Novell and Microsoft's networking and almost completely missed the rise of TCP/IP both in the enterprise as well as the public Internet. When I first started doing networking development for OS/2 at IBM I had to get special permission to get the $1000+ TCP/IP networking kit because it was "owned" by NSD which really, desperately, wanted everyone to develop applications for APPC. APPC was tightly tied to Token Ring and thus they really also minimized R&D into TCP/IP over TR networks.
Although IBM "woke up" to the Internet and personal computer networking with the Lotus deal, it took NSD another year or more to really shift gears, and by then IBM had had enough and dumped the assets onto Cisco for a song.
If kens is still around, an odd source for token ring information might be Carnegie Mellon, which implemented a MASSIVE TR network circa 1986 or 1987 with Type 1 connectors in every dorm room on campus so students could access Andrew from …anywhere.
IBM Networking Systems spent much of the early 1990s dithering and thrashing about how to compete with Novell and Microsoft's networking and almost completely missed the rise of TCP/IP both in the enterprise as well as the public Internet. When I first started doing networking development for OS/2 at IBM I had to get special permission to get the $1000+ TCP/IP networking kit because it was "owned" by NSD which really, desperately, wanted everyone to develop applications for APPC. APPC was tightly tied to Token Ring and thus they really also minimized R&D into TCP/IP over TR networks.
Although IBM "woke up" to the Internet and personal computer networking with the Lotus deal, it took NSD another year or more to really shift gears, and by then IBM had had enough and dumped the assets onto Cisco for a song.
If kens is still around, an odd source for token ring information might be Carnegie Mellon, which implemented a MASSIVE TR network circa 1986 or 1987 with Type 1 connectors in every dorm room on campus so students could access Andrew from …anywhere.