I have no idea what qualifies as the first commercially successful network.
Well, telegraph lines? that's electrical transmission along wires among many-to-many nodes. The trouble with chasing "firsts" is defining the "first what?". Because, there's always a prior case, that's almost but not quite like the "first-of". It's a judgement call. I gave up the practice of calling out firsts. Early personal-computer networking has many origins. Generally, it's about sharing a precious at-the-time resource (say, a database, a hard drive, a cable or transciever to a remote location, and so on). Current loop allowed sharing of Teletypes and use over distance. Where to start? But most of your post, was about Corvus technology, and then about ThickNet Ethernet falling down and hurting people. I can't speak to Corvus stuff, Web search will work that for you, library research if you need period pre-Internet magazines. Even with ThickNet, thick coax had/has prior use in high frequency radio communications. The point about properly mounting heavy cables and taps, is that later networking used *lighter* cabling and taps, so installation safety wasn't an issue. Thus it *seems* to be an issue in uninformed retrospect - who uses big cables today? At the time, mounting heavy cables and associated equipment was part of normal practices, unremarkable. In 1980 or so I ran a network of a hundred plus terminals to a DecSystem-20. Directly at first, later via a terminal server. The terminals were wired on wired-telephone twisted pairs, 50-pair cables of size, between punch-down terminal blocks. We had also ThickNet orange coax cable among several PDP-11 computers between various buildings and the DEC-20 system. Buildings of the era has all kinds of cabling runs, for AC power and phone-lines, pipes for plumbing, etc. Cables were installed following best-practices, other than the fact we ran RS-232 / EIA voltage levels for over 100 feet on twisted pair telephone cables. That's when I learned that bandwidth was related to signal/noise. Baud rates at 9600 baud worked, except for the very longest runs, failing due to distributed capacitance. Local lightning strikes, tended to take out our DEC terminal interface boards when they were directly connected. The later intervening terminal server resolved that. Regards, Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey USA https://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net preserve, recover, restore 1970's computing email: hjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT com or try later herbjohnson AT comcast DOT net