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

[Karl Auerbach]

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--