Ethernet's Emergence from Xerox PARC | Hacker News Reader

Ethernet's Emergence from Xerox PARC

r6.ieee.org

79 pointsrcarmo27 comments

If you like that sort of look back at tech history, and at things that came out from the PARC, I highly recommend "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael Hiltzik. It's a very well-written book with a ton of insights about how a lot of the things we took for granted came to be, from our printers and scanners, tablets, programming languages, and more.

If my memory serves right, it details a bunch of things on the development of laser printers, which gave Xerox a huge edge, the creation of the PARC and the giants that joined it, and many of the things they worked on: the Alto, Smalltalk, the Dynabook, and, indeed, the Ethernet.

It's also pretty funny to read how some administrative red-tape was sometimes being circumvented.

And also a bit sad to read how things went a bit south.

Second this, great book.

I worked for Xerox in 1979-1980. The general Xerox organization was too copier-focused to appreciate the treasure they had at PARC. It's ironic that every new hire was given a copy of "The Billions Nobody Wanted" (by John H. Dessauer), a bio of Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography.

I read that book. It opens with statistics on the number of photocopies made each year in the USA.

Interesting now that Xerox seems to be dropping the ball on making decent reliable copiers.

The question has to be asked - was the last time you copied a paper document (as opposed to printing one out - and maybe not even that :) )? Even the fed-ex kinkos (as major user of such machines) are closing down because people don't promote things with paper anymore. PARC has for years been trying hard to get Xerox to the right place with this - there are many things Xerox should do based on PARC work, like hybrid/functional object printing (which actually uses the mechanical service industry type infrastucture they have setup already). And Xerox is moving in the direction of services around servicing (CareAR, etc). Now the former head of PARC (Steve Hoover) is CTO of Xerox, there is a possibility they might actually do something.

I did some contract work for them in 80s and asked why they were letting Microsoft and Apple blow up the universe..the response (from senior, or should I say Sr. ) management was that they were waiting to see which one won and would then “sue the winner”. Somehow they wound up suing Apple and famously lost on statutory grounds. (For the under-40 crowd: Before Apple ripped off Xerox and Microsoft ripped off Apple for the Graphical User Interface, they both were ripping off CP/M that, in turn, was a ripoff of RSX-11, which followed norms established by IBM, some 30 years earlier! The passage of time has shown those companies couldn’t research their way out of a plastic bag —2022 and we get the same UX with all kinds of smoke and mirrors to explain how cool Taiwan’s new 5nm fabrication is.)

What is even funnier is that half of the major companies founded right after that all basically went to PARC and said 'Great Idea were gone do that'.

Sun, Apple, Microsoft and many others were inspired by it.

One perspective Alan Kay had was that no company could really capitalize on so many different things that came out of PARC. Xerox picked laser printing and capitalized it to the point of being forced by the government to release patents.

How to Invent the Future (2 parts), Alan Kay talking at Stanford - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ

I remember a Jobs interview when he says he visited PARC and they showed him 3 things:

Windows environment (windows, icons, mouse, pull down menu and please appreciate that, back then, all of them were innovations)

Object oriented programming

Connectivity (he didn’t call it Ethernet in his interview. He might have called it the internet)

Amazing!

https://youtu.be/J33pVRdxWbw?t=396

Ethernet was XNS/ITP when it first started. That protocol splintered into DECnet, AppleTalk, Novell and TCP/IP. The advent of async-TCP/IP on commodity hardware (aka Microsoft RAS) caused it to takeover the game and created the dystopia we have now (with nightly national news warning our parents and grandparents that Russia is readying a “cyberattack” that will shutdown the power running their oxygen machines and hearing aide chargers). TCP/IP could transcend LANs and WANs without special NNBs (now called routers) for the first time. (Prior to that, WAN communications were distance-priced, making it cost prohibitive for spammers or disenfranchised kids in USSR ghettos to cause your local hospital to become locked out during surgeries —your local hospital built from the success of the Allied Forces, likely including your parents and grand parents.)

Disclaimer: VMS device drivers for third-party Unibus Ethernet adapter board bc DEC wasn’t shipping them yet (due to the albatrosses of PCL, DECnet and later OSI). I later went to DEC and SynOptics, but didn’t even know Thompson was at SynOptics. (They had hired a genius European foreign national as software manager from a company down the street bc he wanted to remain in US and he, in turn, hired a 70s-series Indian to mentor off me, but instead he violated accepted business ethics, used our practices against us and caused millions of dollars worth of damage to SynOptics and Me personally…they tried to fire him but HR kicked it back and in fury, they transferred him to HR and ordered him not to touch any computers until he quit and went to work across the street for a competitor (ultimate betrayal by Valley rules) and eventually wound up a VP —of HR— for the famous Pagoda owner! Glad I can laugh about it all now. I sat next to John Chaimberlain many years later when a Chinese presenter said SynOpsis in a thick tone that sounded like SynOptics and John raised his hand and asked why we were bringing up that mess again. LoL Just ramblings of now irrelevant things that went on in the exciting years before the dot-com bubble changed the players.

If anyone wants to get into the low-level details of Ethernet, O'Reilly has a good book (a bit old now, so may not have the latest releases):

* https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-the-definitive...

A lot of interesting stuff going on with single-pair (two wires):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#Sin...

I recommend The Triumph of Ethernet: Technological Communities and the Battle for the LAN Standard by Urs von Burg for a great history of Ethernet.

Another interesting bit of history. An ethernet competitor, the ChaosNet, was being developed at the MIT AI Lab around the same time. It had some advantages over ethernet, especially at high loads, but no marketing push behind it. I believe it was mostly developed by Jack Holloway and others who did software for it (Dave Moon among others?). I believe Metcalf and Holloway were undergrad roommates. I was a junior helper on this project and hooked up some machines in the plasma physics research groups to it. The name, ChaosNet was objectionable to (D)ARPA and the military because they had a classified network with the same name. Do others have, perhaps better, recollections about all this?

>This presentation will trace the history and development of Ethernet as a 10 Mb/s

And we will [1] have 800G and 1.6T Ethernet [2] around 2025 - 2030. That is 200GB/s.

[1] https://ethernetalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Ethe...

[2] The Case for 1.6 Terabit Ethernet

https://www.ieee802.org/3/B400G/public/21_05/dambrosia_b400g...

Token Ring's where it's at - you mark my words.

Tolkien’s ring has a better story.

Pfft. It's ATM, everywhere, for all the things.

Fun thing about early ethernet cards, they had a bad habit of catching on fire. Had it happen a few times.

How does that happen? Bad capacitors?

Probably shielded cables and ground faults.

when Silicon Valley still had a stomach for true innovation!! It's sad how the pinnacle of innovation today is one big company copying some stupid thing from another big or small company, like the stupid so-called shorts of youtube!!!

When means when big companies free labs exists, ruled by technicians not managers, without time-to-market pressure, with public funds.

https://blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-researc... https://archive.vn/CKdqr

That's the "when"... To reproduce it we need similar conditions, the opposite of actual neoliberal agenda...

Thank the triumph of ‘shareholder dominance’ and such creatures as Jack Welch for starving blue-sky R&D to death.

I can't name single responsible, so I accuse the system witch happen to be the neoliberal school. Unfortunately too many born in a neoliberal society, having passed neoliberal schools indoctrination have issue to differentiate between them and the rest of our societies, so they tend to think that there is no alternative, or like that or like some dictatorships around the world, having completely forgotten even the recent past.

Actually IMVHO when the web became as popular as minitel for the masses a kind of Great Reset actually happen: people do not even know what was before the early 2000s, even if they were already born and sufficiently aged to remember personally...

They have all these RnD budgets and they keep hiring all the van Rossums and Ken Thompsons of the world... They can probably set a side a 1 percent of a percent of their gigantic budgets and create their own little PARCS and do something useful. Thanks for the article.

Of course, possible is possible, but actually I see no one who can an almost no one who can't interesting in that...

There is also an enormous issue: schools/universities. In the past we have had talents, because they were smart, BUT also because they can attend schools/unis good enough to make their talents grow and a society around to make that flourish. In the present society we still have smart peoples BUT we miss large part of education, now hyper-centered around neoliberals with even universities that does not form "techies", "people of culture" but modern stereotypical "qualified Ford-model workers", witch means form people not for the society needs and desire but for a very little part of it, the actual élites needs and desires witch happen to be against 99% common interests.

I a decade I even expect that universities will not be anymore universities but "Google school", "Mersk school", "Black Rock school" etc starting from the early childhood to better bend peoples to their own needs and desire.

In the end: take a Chinese who never exit China, a perfectly honest and neutral one he/she very probably do not think to live in a dictatorship but in a just regime that make China great, give foods, jobs etc. having not comparisons, having studied government propaganda he/she can't really know something else, only very few very smart can form a different view but still having issues to figure a different working society... At that point to came back to a society with educations and conditions to make talents flourish really like in our past it would take 50 even 100 years, we need to pass through a big scarcity because all regimes to rein need to give something to the people and they give something in bad ways wasting resources making them scarce, at that point an enemy appear, a fight, suffering etc and finally enough people will realize that they are in a dictatorship, then they unite against the regime who of course try to repress at first demolish from the inside thereafter etc and more unrest happen for more years. That's the issue. We probably came back to a good evolving and advanced society but for 2060, 2080...

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