That rang some bells, working in a communal data-centre, serving all of town, and smaller neighbouring towns. At 100Mb/s. Funny thing was the town still used many terminals in its offices. Serial Siemens terminals, speaking to Siemens RM400, RM600 and something called BS2000, also by Siemens. Of course with baudrates, parity, even/odd, start&stop bits nobody else would have used. Because Siemens...
So how do you connect them? By using adapters not much bigger than a matchbox, somehow powered by the serial port! At insane prices per piece, more than the terminal itself.
Shrug? Vee arr government, vee don't need to care about zat!1!!
(Town is broke by now, btw.)
Similar things in all police stations of that state.
(Many more towns, counties, cities broke there, too.)
Reasoning for using FDDI was that there existed equipment (by Allied Telesis IIRC) which could detect someone messing with the fibre somewhere, out of sight.
Not that much later, in the German HQ of some larger insurance company, I had the privilige of playing with FDDI at 1Gb/s. And witness the oh so unbreakable IBM S390(or was it still 370 at the time?) go down hard, several times...
Hrrm. What else did I witness? Oh, some Compaq thing made for a rack, 4 units high, sitting on a desk without cover, making you feel like you'd be in a vacuumer, or right next to an airport. Whooooouuuuiiiiieeeehissssss!
That thing ran Novell Netware, responsible for every login from any client across all offices in town. Handled by a full-length ISA-Card, full eight bits wide! Not 16. Not using the EISA-slots...(facepalm)