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

[Dave Täht]

The PCI DECCHIP tulip cards were :great: they had a 4 packet buffer (8K onboard)
and could make line rate easily. 

We used them (eventually) in our first embedded linux wireless routers.

http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-invented-embedded-linux-based.html


On Sat, Mar 30, 2019 at 12:47:53AM -0700, Karl Auerbach wrote:
> 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--
> 
> 
> 
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