[thechat] Home network for a dummy (US "Roadrunner" cable service)

[Jorah Lavin]

Hi

I've been doing HTML for years now, and am considered by non-tech people to
be a "techie," but I basically know nothing about hardware.

This fact is now starting to haunt me.

At the end of November, I'm moving into a new townhouse (yay!) and will have
cable internet access for the first time. I have a relatively modern PC
running Win 2K Professional, my wife has an ancient Mac Quadra, and she will
have a PC running Win 98 set up fairly soon after our move.

I need to hook all of these computers up to the cable system. My wife called
the Time Warner cable to get our account set up, and the woman who took the
call rather snootily (IMHO) told her that she would need a wireless modem to
hook all of the computers to the cable, which makes no sense to me. I'm not
interested in a wireless network in my house, and I suspect that I would
need specialized hardware that wouldn't fit the old PC and the old Mac.
So... I need your help to figure out how I can set up a little LAN, what
hardware I'd need, etc., so that I can sound like I know what I'm talking
about when I call these people back.

The Mac has some sort of network cable that we used to use to network two
Macs and a printer together, (some sort of Ethernet?? We got the hardware
for that back in '96) but neither PC has any sort of network cards.

>From "listening in" on discussions on TheList, I suspect that I need to
network the three machines together somehow, then hook them to a router
(??!) and then to the cable modem... or does there need to be a firewall box
in there somewhere?

Can anyone help?  :-{

-Jorah

PS: Their hardware page is here... but I've no idea what any of this is
about.

http://www.twcarolina.com/cablemodemsupport/default.asp