Ah, well that was the good thing about Token Bus, the maths underlying its protocol guaranteed throughput for all nodes even for the chattiest of protocols. Two nodes playing Doom wouldn't impact on the throughput seen by other nodes, and indeed other nodes had equal access to the Doom playing nodes. The same wasn't true of Ethernet or Token Ring - the way they dealt with collisions or contentions relied on some randomness, which worked up to a point before throughput dropped off a cliff. Token Bus was the slowest of the three, but you always got that speed no matter what.
Coax Ethernet was cheaper from the very beginning. Token Ring gear I remember being quite pricey, and Token Bus wasn't seen outside of industrial applications. Ethernet was technologically the worst of the three, but was good enough for most purposes and so that's what people bought. By the time everyone realised that star topologies were the way of the future it had become funamentally necessary to retain the Ethernet frame structure, which we pretty much still have today.
I'm afraid I don't agree - a switched Ethernet like we have today still isn't a deterministic thing like Token Bus was.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
