[ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP

Fri Sep 2 13:37:29 PDT 2016

Not sure if people are interested in small details but this write-up also brings up whether CERN was the first place to have Cisco routers in Europe.  I am glad it has a question mark after it. I have this recollection that roughly around this same time period, SRI was installing Cisco routers in a testbed for USAEUR. We were working out of Heidelberg (nice place to be).  I don't remember or have access to records to know exactly when we did this. Ed Kozel was lead so perhaps it is clearer in his memory (He was at SRI at this time).  I was just asked to help with the Cisco routers; and a little later teach some Army personnel about the Internet and networking by preparing and teaching a class for them. My involvement was brief and it served as my introduction to x.25 and of course the Cisco box  (I remember reading the X.25 documentation on the plane over). We certainly had lots of interaction with Cisco to make it work okay.

barbara 

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Today's Topics:

  1. Re: Ethernet, was Why TCP? (Brian E Carpenter)

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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 18:07:27 +1200
From: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?
To: internet-history at postel.org
Message-ID: <a6bac2f7-5ae3-32b6-52a7-b5b16dc5895d at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

On 02/09/2016 00:19, George Ross wrote:
>> But cheap and cheerful won the day in many campuses, before business
>> even knew that they needed a LAN. As you say, Ethernet only penetrated
>> business seriously was when UTP came along.
> 
> Going by our (Edinburgh dcs) experience, what came before wasn't really
> suitable for serious business roll-out.
> 
> Thick yellow cable was hard to install, and then drilling it for vampire
> taps took a bit of skill and wasn't easy in an overhead cable basket with a
> load of other stuff round about.  And it quickly ran out of bandwidth, and
> installing more was a pain.
> 
> Thinnet was much easier to install, but rather fragile.  We had our techs
> crawling through offices about once a week trying to find the latest fault
> caused by feet, dripping bicycles, hum-loops from contact with the
> plumbing, and so on.  It was easier to install, but we got to the stage
> where we simply had too many separate wires to feed them all through all
> offices, and that put constraints on how people could be assigned desks.

That's absolutely true, but I can tell you that if we hadn't installed
kilometres of Cheapernet at CERN at negligible cost, without ever needing
to make a serious budget request, we wouldn't have had the physicists
(i.e. the users) on our side when we requested a budget of many millions
to recable the entire site with UTP5. By that time (~1995), they were completely
dependent on a site-wide LAN. So that turned out to be the biggest single
funding request I ever wrote, and the quickest to be granted.

So I think the progression Ethernet -> Cheapernet -> 10baseT -> 100baseT
was the only way it could have happened, in academia. And getting back
to the origins of this thread, it was closely linked to the progression
from Proprietary -> Multivendor in the protocol world, where the main
advantage for TCP/IP in the mid-1980s was that it came free with BSD Unix
and especially with SunOS, and ran over Ethernet, just when Unix
workstations were invading our world.

I don't necessarily agree 100% with Ben Segal's view of history, but I
think this is very interesting nevertheless (written in 1995):
http://ben.web.cern.ch/ben/TCPHIST.html

  Brian

> UTP was a *major* improvement on all of that.  It was easy to install, much
> more robust, and simple to re-patch as folk moved office.  Our hub site
> rapidly became a mess of knitting, though, and on more than one occasion we
> had to take everything down over a weekend to re-patch neatly from scratch.
> 
> Soft-configurable VLANs finally made all of this easy to manage.  Install
> and patch once, and almost never have to go back into the IT closets.
> 
> (We had to re-install most of our original UTP, though, because it was cat3,
> a lot of it was over-length, and because 10baseT was so robust we had
> doubled-up ports using the "spare" wires.  But that's another story...)
> 
> --
> George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP, University of Edinburgh,
> School of Informatics, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9AB
> Mail: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk  Voice: 0131 650 5147  Fax: 0131 650 6899
> PGP: 1024D/AD758CC5  B91E D430 1E0D 5883 EF6A  426C B676 5C2B AD75 8CC5
> 
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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