🚀 go-pugleaf

Although you are not supposed to, you can often get away with simply
connecting thin and thick ethernet cables together with a barrel-to-bnc
connector.  It may cause reflections and noise, but if you're lucky it won't.

You can buy a box to bridge between thin and thick ethernet, or you can
get a second ethernet board for one of your (non-Xerox) machines and set
up a gateway.  I know a second ethernet board for a Sun Sparcstation 1
or 1+ costs about $500.  A bridge is a repeater that makes the two cables
act like a single net.  A gateway is smarter (and thus needs orders of
magnitude more administration) and forwards packets from one net to the
other as appropriate.  You can get "smart" bridges that are essentially
gateways, and you can get really confusing by doing things like bridging
the two cables for PUP and NS, but treating them as separate nets with a
gateway for TCP/IP.

-Steve  sjc@iti.org