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

[Karl Auerbach]

For certain those early PC Ethernet NICs were pretty awful - the 
original 3COM 3C501 card had only one buffer.  A TCP stack on it often 
missed quick ACKs from a faster peer (and with respect to those early 
PC's, pretty much every peer was faster.)

But it wasn't long before things in the PC world got much better.  By 
the time ULANA rolled around in the mid 1980's Intel had put out its 
first generation of reasonably smart Ethernet chipsets - I wrote a 
driver using them.  They felt surprisingly like an old IBM 360/370 
channel - one wrote a set of descriptors to do scatter/gather on chains 
of receives and transmits.  All of the hard work of dealing with the 
CSMA/CD system and back-to-back packets was in the Intel hardware - and 
all of the Ethernet access timers were in there as well.

There were a lot of other interoperability problems in that era. That 
was a time of IEEE deciding that Ethernet needed SNAP headers and 
ISO/OSI was making everyone think of variable length addresses (such as 
NSAPs.)  There is a legacy from that - the framing of things carried on 
ethernet VLANs is still potentially excessively complicated and probably 
has driven at least as many network programmers into wall-banging 
frenzies as the CRLF vs LF vs LFCR vs NVT/Telnet and whitespace/tabbing 
conventions.

Wasn't there also some disagreement over whether the IPv4 broadcast 
address was 0.0.0.0 (BSD) or 255.255.255.255 (everybody else)?

     --karl--