I love Ken's blog posts and this one is right up my alley.
> introduced in 1973, Ethernet is the predominant way of wiring computers together.
That sentence does not really convey how hard it was for Ethernet to win the network L1/L2 protocol wars. It was fairly popular right from the start because it worked well enough (better than it should) and was very simple to understand, configure, and operate. It also kept evolving with new media.
But there were other systems it had to compete with, in some use cases (ISP's) well into the late 1990's/early 2000's.
Engineering workstations (Sun/SGI/IBM/HP) were early adopters but often had to integrate with mainframe/minicomputers running things like:
- Token Ring: IBM was the 800lb gorilla at the time
- FDDI: supported 100mbps over MMF!
- DEC LAT
- Novell/IPX: was very popular in the 80's and persisted well into the 1990's. Most DOS games like Doom *only* supported Novell/IPX
- Macintosh: AppleTalk
- There were many other proprietary PC/DOS protocols but they were not memorable
- Ethernet was very popular but consistently lagged in supporting the fastest link speeds that ISP's needed. The industry rapidly shifted to 1G (1999) and 10G (2003) Ethernet once they became widely available.
- FDDI: 100mbps over MMF. The MAE-EAST peering exchange in the mid 1990's used DEC Gigaswitches with unique switched FDDI 100mbps Full-Duplex mode where each port was it's own separate FDDI domain.
- ATM: Telco types last gasp at optimizing for circuit switched networks (phone calls) at the expense of packet switched networks like TCP/IP. ATM over Sonet/SDH however supported much faster link speeds initially.
- Packet over Sonet/SDH: Allows the use full-size TCP/IP packets over high speed fiber (Sonet/SDH) links without ATM segmentation. This is what many OC3-OC48 ISP circuits were running before 1GE/10GE took over.