Ethernet Turns 40
theinstitute.ieee.org
theinstitute.ieee.org
Now we all use Ethernet, and Ethernet has been around so long that devices are available at practically every price point. But for a long time, Ethernet was not the only choice.
As a Mac user, I was using AppleTalk (later called LocalTalk) until the late 90's. The controllers were built into every Mac, and the PhoneNet transceivers and wiring were extremely cheap. We just used plain, common, thin telephone wiring, daisy-chained from computer to computer. No need for hubs or carefully categorized cabling. The devices configured their own addresses, so we only had to give them names that meant something to humans, and not memorize all these 192.168 numbers.
LocalTalk was slow (230kbps), and the lack of DMA on most of the controllers really sucked, but it was a nice and easy way to start a network.
Documentation: http://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/mac/...
"“In 1973, the Internet [which at that time was basically the ARPANET] on a good day ran at 50 kb/s,” Metcalfe reflected in his oral history. “Ethernet ran at 2.94 megabits per second.” Over the years, people urged Metcalfe to round the number up to 3. He always resisted, as a matter of emphasis: If one rounds 2.94 Mb to 3 Mb, the rounding error is more than 50 kb/s. “Ethernet’s round-off error was bigger than Internet,” said Metcafe. “That’s how fast Ethernet was running.”"
http://www.isa.org/InTechTemplate.cfm?Section=InTech&templat...
From the article: During the 1970s, a Harvard graduate student named Robert Metcalfe read a paper about something called Aloha Net. It was a radio system used in the Hawaiian Islands to send small messages, also called data packets, between islands. ... The packet communications network he designed became the worldwide standard we know today as Ethernet.
Still waiting on that last one. ;) Hooray for 802.11.