[ih] Internet History - from Community to Big Tech?

[Richard Bennett]

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. 

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. 

> On Apr 1, 2019, at 12:01 AM, Karl Auerbach <karl at CAVEBEAR.COM> wrote:
> 
> On 3/31/19 8:13 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> 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?
> 
> 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.)
> 
>     --karl--
> 
> 

—
Richard Bennett
High Tech Forum <http://hightechforum.org/> Founder
Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator

Internet Policy Consultant

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