<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Synoptics was a spinout from Xerox PARC, where one variety of Ethernet over UTP originated; the other one was created by ATT Information Systems. There was a PARC guy on the StarLAN task force that whispered rumors about them while we were writing our standard for 1 Mbps Ethernet frames over Cat 3 cabling. We were a little nervous about finalizing a standard for 1 Mbps while somebody else was developing a product that could do 10, but we managed to convince ourselves that Cat 3 wouldn’t reliably support the higher speeds and still meet emission regulations. So StarLAN followed the ATTIS/Intel 82588 approach. <div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">10BASE-T was done by some of the people on the StarLAN committee as a sort of 2.0 version, chiefly Pat Thaler who was the 10BASE-T chair. As frequently happens in the standards world they chose not to follow Synoptics in all the relevant details. I don’t recall if Synoptics had a full duplex mode, but that was a key feature of 10BASE-T. Turns out it’s easier to prevent collisions than to detect them, signal them, and recover from them. <br class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Apr 1, 2019, at 12:01 AM, Karl Auerbach <<a href="mailto:karl@CAVEBEAR.COM" class="">karl@CAVEBEAR.COM</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div class="">On 3/31/19 8:13 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">Heh, the hub-and-spoke redesign came from IEEE 802.3 Low-cost LAN task group, of which I was a member. Apart from NICs, the economics of coax Ethernet were dominated by labor, wire, transceivers, and fault isolation, all of which were much cheaper with twisted pair, hub-and-spoke, and RJ-45 connectors.<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">Do you happen to know how the Synoptics Lattisnet/Astranet pre-cursor to 10-base-T came about? Their stuff was very similar to what eventually came out of IEEE. I was under the impression that the founders of Synoptics kinda had the basic idea of doing an ethernet-thing using phone wire in a star arrangement. Am I mis-remembering?<br class=""><br class="">And yes, coax, of any of its forms, was expensive to buy, expensive to install, subject outages caused by a single flawed connector or stations, and horribly expensive to diagnose and repair. (But even the original 10-base-T stuff I used from David Systems and Synoptics had that awful AUI slide connector.)<br class=""><br class=""> --karl--<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""></div></div></blockquote></div><br class=""><div class="">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">—<br class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Richard Bennett<br class=""><a href="http://hightechforum.org" class="">High Tech Forum</a> Founder</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Internet Policy Consultant</div></div></div>
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