I'm not even especially hardware-y myself but am sharing this because I've been riveted for 20 minutes at the sheer joy of this video. And slightly imagining the what-if potential for this thing which was essentially shoving 6Mbps over coax in 1985, had it ever been repurposed circa 1993
It doesn't look like you could hit disk surface at that speed with MFM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST506/ST412 and the ISA bus was right around there. Removable disk was like 1/100th that speed and you'd fill up a consumer hard disk in less than a minute at that rate.
I know today we can easily utilize 6Mbps but relatively speaking this feels like it'd be the equivalent to something like 1 Tbps today. I don't know what the home pc user would be doing with it.
There was a cable-based serial terminal networking system called LocalNet, which was all over the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus circa 1985. The LocalNet modems/concentrators connected terminals and computers throughout the campus. You'd fire up your terminal, hit ENTER for a prompt, then type CALL xxx,yyy (xxx and yyy being hex addresses) to reach a particular host. The host just saw it as just another RS-232 modem.
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure you're correct. Interestingly though, I have an PC I got from a college that has Win 3.11 and has a network card in it and TCP/IP isn't enabled or on it. I was trying to figure out how to use the network card, but all I can find are a bunch of other communication standards.
I think you needed Trumpet WinSOCK to get 311 on the internet. And there wasn't much other than email, and Netscape to do with it back then. Gopher maybe, but I didn't hear about what that was until it was more or less dead.
