How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

That last paragraph is literally the same basic sentence about "little steps" written three times in slightly different ways.

Did you get this quote from an AI written SEOspam site?

But network-layer bridges were not a tiny step, they were a fundamentally new type of device with many enabling technologies. The point of the article is that it was revolutionary, not incremental.

> but unlike the extension cord case, nothing would catch literal fire

Somewhere, out there, is a story of an overburdened network setup literally catching fire, and it’s hopefully making its way to us.

Occasionally people don't understand how to plug extension power cables together, either, especially during times of high stress and low sleep.

Once upon a time, when I was in IT support, I got a call from someone in a satellite office across town saying that their computer wouldn't turn on. A new production had begun and everyone was a bit frantic, so this was an urgent request. After asking them to hold the power switch in for a few seconds and try to turn it on again, I asked them to make sure the power cable was secure and that the computer was plugged in. It was, of course, but the computer still wouldn't turn on, so it was time to jump on the bicycle and ride across town with a new power supply in tow, figuring it would be a quick fix.

When I arrive, I see that, indeed, the computer was plugged in to a power strip. And that power strip was plugged in to itself. From then on, I always made sure to ask, "Is the computer plugged into the wall?" Saved myself a few bicycle trips that way.

Not recommended but these bad boys make a lot of things work, and cause a lot of damage! https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61A5WvzcgsL._AC_UL960_QL...

Too late: Tried this at work; Did a marvelous job sharing satellite internet with the whole barracks.

That's why the new Ethernet protocol 802.11aq is recommending Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) as a robust alternative to Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). Not only it's more robust, but it is more secure with extra resilience against broadcast storm. It also can support multi-cast function more easily and intuitively at data-link layer [1],[2]. Compared to the new SPB, STP looks like an immature hacks and why it took so long to be replaced is beyond me.

[1]IEEE 802.1aq:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1aq

[2] 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging Design and Evolution: The Architect's Perspective:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/book/6381532

> people who didn’t understand networking

A couple of decades ago I witnessed a classic demonstration of Weinberg's Corollary¹ when a spanning tree misconfiguration on a freshly-installed BlackDiamond disabled LINX for hours, throwing half of Britain's ISP peering into chaos. The switch in question was evidently cursed: it'd been dropped on my foot earlier that week, thus disabling me for hours, and everyone else involved in that project was dead within two years.

__

[1] "an expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy"

STP is basically magic - and being able to reliably optimize it to reduce reconvergence time makes you a magician.

> but unlike the extension cord case, nothing would catch literal fire

I might be taking this too literally (I fell down the Kunsberg Bridge rabbithole recently), but with only one input on nearly all extension cords, I don't see how you'd get into a position of "fire" rather than "nothing happening".

Even if you did have two ways of putting power into your extension lead, it wouldn't necessarily lead to fire; household "ring" circuits (still very common in UK houses) are by definition a loop.

10 Mbps was fine for, frankly, just about anything under 100 MB. And since 100 Mbps hubs were rare beasts, most being switches, they stayed a lot more expensive for a long time. Hell, my first home network was 10 Mbps on thinnet because it was so much cheaper than a 10 Mbps hub, and that was ca. 1997. I'd had 100 Mbps available in the dorms the year before, but you were looking at $250 for 100 vs $40 or less for 10 - which, in college student dollars, is a lot.

When we had hard drives that barely topped 1 GB, which could be copied in under 17 minutes even on 10 Mbps, there just wasn't a huge incentive to upgrade speed. But once 100 made sense for homes - supporting 802.11g - the price of switches fell rapidly because it was no longer just businesses buying them. And so 1 Gbps fell more quickly, because the background hardware was getting cheaper.

My 1998 computer with 100 Mbps and a 6.4 GB drive got used a few times as the piracy data exfiltration machine because it could pull down the 5 GB of stuff we'd accumulated so much faster, then plug it up to the three-apartment network we had set up and let everyone pull it to their own machines on the 10 Mbps we had there. Our outgoing connection was a Linux box on a 56k connection shared among six of us; it's not like 10 Mbps slowed any of that down.

100BASE-T marked the transition from Cat 3 to Cat 5, and a lot of sites were actually still making use of coax. That was necessary but was an impediment because it meant a high cost of adoption. This coincided with the fact that, at the time, it was largely unnecessary for the broader market of users: these were the days of IDE/ATA-1 disks, acoustic modems and 300 DPI black and white printers. You watched video with VCR.

I recall using a business desktop back in the day with a common IDE disk, and also attached to a NetWare share. The NetWare share was much faster than the local drive although the network was only 10BASE-T. Around that time meetings began: how much was it going to cost to replace all the cable (half of which was still coax) and buy 100BASE-T switches? (Answer: a couple hundred dollars per drop.) That process took two years and another six months to do the work: a quarter of a decade.

1000BASE-T was specified for Cat 5: the floorboards didn't have to be torn up to replace all that cable everyone just paid for. The cost of PHY/SERDES components fell greatly during that time and made 1000BASE-T hardware affordable. Moving from 100BASE-T to 1000BASE-T was, therefore, cheap and easy and took correspondingly less time.

The really crazy thing is that the consumer space is still stuck on 1gbps nearly twenty years after 10G base-t.

Switches didn’t require one port per host. They required one port per layer-2 network segment. The original switches I deployed had a handful AUI ports to which we attached to 10BASE5 transceivers. Hosts still connected via 10BASE2 or 10BASE5 to the “single wire” of their layer-2 network segment.

Over the years the cost of switches lowered to the point where it became cost effective to directly connect hosts and reap the benefits of reducing layer-2 segments to a single host. In between there was also a time where most hosts connected to hubs which then connected to switches.

When switches first arrived, most of them were unmanaged, or only had basic snmp counters, but they solved the collision problem.

I remember my first Internet company, where after getting an ARN for free. Coordinated with uunet over IRC to get them to pull routes from me, turning up our second T1.

The second traffic started to flow the collision light on the 24 port 3com fast Ethernet hub went solid.

I thought I had routed the Internet over my link.... but no, two T1s through an Alta Vista firewall running on a DecStation was enough to do it with a basic three their web app while backups were running.

I had lots of experience with 10base2/5 with more traffic, but the stocastic nature of web traffic was problematic.

If you lived through the growth of the Cisco chassis switches, the ASIC improvements that allowed for management was quite obvious.

I remember fighting with packet engine engineers, advocating for jumbo frames as default. They wanted to support gig-e hubs, which would have never been useful due to collisions.

History proved me right there, nothing simpler than a store and forward bridge made it to mass market for Gig-e

If you were ever responsible for keeping a thicknet or thinnet Ethernet network running, you would gladly accept that tradeoff. If you've experienced a floor of a building or a whole department go offline because someone removed a terminator, or (this is real) decided to stick the thinnet onto their radio antenna to see if it improved reception, you'd value the increase in reliability a lot more than the extra cost.

There were actually these connectors you could get from AMP that would hide away the thinnet connection behind a wall plate, with proprietary connectors to the machine, just to keep people's hands away from the shared network segment.