[ih] "The First Router" on Jeopardy

[Bill Woodcock]

> On Nov 23, 2021, at 1:53 AM, Tony Li via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> On Nov 22, 2021, at 4:11 PM, Guy Almes via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> A later language shift came a few years later, when the word 'bridge' became old-fashioned and people (or was this just marketing?) began to use the word 'switch' to refer to a high-performance bridge.  And, later, the word 'switch' was used also for level-3 packet forwarding.
>> I do not recall where that came from, but did notice it.
> 
> 
> The word ‘switch’ was introduced by Kalpana as a marketing term for their ASIC implementation of a bridge.

That was 1990-1991, no?  We were doing switching (and calling it switching) in 1988 at Farallon.  Started with LocalTalk, and then added Ethernet in 1989, if I have my dates right.  I have a very distinct recollection, because I got chewed out for wearing the product T-shirt on the Interop show floor before the release.  :-)  I believe Barb Tien caught me and threw a hoodie over me and hustled me back to the booth to change out of it.

The distinction between bridging and switching that I remember at the time (and still believe) is that bridging was taking packets from one side, regenerating (and reencapsulating) as necessary, and retransmitting out the other side.  Or flooding out the other ports, in the case of something with more than two ports.  A “repeater” was a bridge that specifically had two ports, whereas a “bridge” had two or more ports (but generally more, else you’d have called it a repeater).  By contrast, a “switch” switched packets between ports as necessary, rather than flooding them indiscriminately.

“Layer 3 switching” on the other hand, was marketing talk for “routing really fast."

                                -Bill

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