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

[Richard Bennett]

The name Ethernet has survived, but the networks we call Ethernets today don’t share much with the Bluebook Ethernet beyond the frame format. One of the nice things about hub and spoke is you can use any kind of wire you want since wires are not shared. So yeah, we can have terabit long haul Ethernet. 

Sharing inhibits progress.

> On Apr 1, 2019, at 1:29 PM, Steve Mikulasik <Steve.Mikulasik at civeo.com> wrote:
> 
> My favorite was Bob Metcalfe saying Ethernet will be replaced by FDDI by the year 2000. To be fair, this was 1990 and Ethernet would be deployed a lot differently in the near future. It is just ironic that Ethernet has killed nearly every L2 technology it is put up against.
>  
> “My own projection is that Ethernet will be obsolete by the year 2000, being replaced in the mainstream primarily by FDDI”
> 
> https://books.google.com/books?id=iBwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA17&dq=bob%20metcalfe%20token%20ring&pg=PA17#v=onepage&q=bob%20metcalfe%20token%20ring&f=false <https://books.google.com/books?id=iBwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA17&dq=bob%20metcalfe%20token%20ring&pg=PA17#v=onepage&q=bob%20metcalfe%20token%20ring&f=false>
>  
>  
> From: internet-history-bounces at postel.org <internet-history-bounces at postel.org> On Behalf Of Richard Bennett
> Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2019 8:31 PM
> To: Scott O. Bradner <sob at sobco.com>
> Cc: Internet History <internet-history at postel.org>
> Subject: Re: [ih] Internet History - from Community to Big Tech?
>  
> One of the funniest bits of history about Ethernet is an interview where Bob Metcalfe said he and Boggs designed around passive cable because they felt a hub or switch would be a bottleneck. Given that the switch is an electronic device that moves bits between other electronic devices this never made much sense. Can a NIC generate traffic faster than than a switch can relay it? And as we see with switching fabrics, the wire has been the bottleneck all along. 

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

Internet Policy Consultant

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