Rolanet was a networking standard, developed in the former German Democratic Republic

German Democratic Republic

The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...

 (GDR) and introduced in 1987 by the computer manufacturer Robotron

Robotron

VEB Kombinat Robotron was the biggest East German electronics manufacturer. It was based in Dresden and employed 68,000 people . It produced personal computers, SM EVM minicomputers, the ESER mainframe computers, several computer peripherals as well as home computers, radios and television...

. It enabled computer networking over coax cable and glass fiber with a range of 1000 meters. Networking speed was 500 kBd

Baud

In telecommunications and electronics, baud is synonymous to symbols per second or pulses per second. It is the unit of symbol rate, also known as baud rate or modulation rate; the number of distinct symbol changes made to the transmission medium per second in a digitally modulated signal or a...

, comparable to other standards of the day. A maximum of 253 computers could be connected using Rolanet.

Two variants of Rolanet existed:

• Rolanet 1, introduced in 1987, saw limited deployment.
• Rolanet 2 was planned as a successor to Rolanet 1, but presumably never got beyond the prototype stage.

A scaled-down version of Rolanet, BICNet, was used for educational purposes.

It is no longer possible to assemble a functioning Rolanet system today, due to lack of software and working hardware.

Sources

http://www.robotrontechnik.de/index.htm?/html/netzwerke/netzwerk.htm#rolanet (in German)