Cambridge Ring (computer network)

The Cambridge Ring was an experimental local area network architecture developed at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge starting in 1974 and continuing into the 1980s. It was a ring network with a theoretical limit of 255 nodes (though such a large number would have badly affected performance), around which cycled a fixed number of packets. Free packets would be "loaded" with data by a machine wishing to send, marked as received by the destination machine, and "unloaded" on return to the sender; thus in principle there could be as many simultaneous senders as packets. The network ran over twin twisted-pair cabling (plus a fibre-optic section).

People associated with the project include Andy Hopper, David Wheeler, Maurice Wilkes, and Roger Needham.

In 2002 the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory launched a graduate society called the Cambridge Computer Lab Ring named after the Cambridge Ring.

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