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30 Years of Ethernet
Babylon Rocker writes "An interview with one of the inventors of Ethernet." Metcalfe talks about the history of Ethernet as well as what he's been up to for the last couple years. (Not surprisingly, he's now a VC ;)
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w00t!!, now for the serious side.. Ethernet is awesome, but I'm already tired of it. I can't wait to sit back and see what happens with 802.11(alphanumeric character) 30 years down the line.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
What's VC stand for?
I read the article and still don't quite get it
Does anyone have BitTorrent for the past 30 years of the internet? I really need it. Thanks!
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Happy Birthday Ethernet!! Hurray for Ethernet! May it live long and prosper, and my bandwidth never end.
Metcalfe has a habit of saying stupid things, I wonder why people keep listening to him. One great invention thirty years ago, paired with a huge ego, does not an oracle make.
314-15-9265
Wait... if Ethernet has been around 30 years, that makes TCP/IP PRETTY DAMN OLD!!!!! Anyone up for re-inventing the wheel??? Maybe someone can make a protocol in which practically any piece of information can be traded, with a special way to commit a special pipeline to different medias (such as movie/music downloads getting a compressed, special set of ports used just for that purpose..).
Next thing you know, the teleco's will be bringing up charges against us for inventing a better internet... when will this end!?!
OR OR Or......... Maybe I'm delusional...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
VP=venture capitalist
Wow, it's been 30 years already, and i *still* haven't managed to get my mitts on a set of RJ45 crimpers...
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
You guys just slashdotted C|Net.
An interesting but old article on wired about Metcalfe here: The Legend of Bob Metcalfe
He joined the Vietcong? That's pretty suprising!
Well they do say vietnam is a beautiful country now that American invaders aren't trying ton bomb into the stone age and kill everyone who doesn't dig bigmacs...
Basically, how much really should we thank the guy?
Less is more !
If you're a "free software" true believer, I guess that column must irritate. But I don't see anything stupid about it. Care to get specific?
According to Metcalfe, Ethernet is competing with SONET and Fibre Channel, although he claims that ethernet is winning due to its "internet-compatibility," among other things. To me, this seems like steps in the wrong direction. If fibre optics do not integrate well with the present structure of the internet, then we should be changing the structure, not sticking to the old concept of ethernet. When ethernet was invented, it took advantage of technology available 30 years ago. Since then, we have only been improving on the implementation. Despite the fact that SONET and Fibre Channel are the current "Godzillas," THEY are the ones with the novel technology, and avoiding them would not be in the best interest of advancing technology.
What, no gratuitous Al Gore comments? ;)
Second, Metcalfe defines "broadband" to mean "high bitrate" rather than "uses a broad frequency band". Nitpickers like me have been quibbling over this change in definitions, but if someone like Metcalfe has gone over, it's time to let it drop!
"The technology is 30 years old...who'd want to use it?"
Wasn't that one of Microsoft's arguments against Linux at one time?
And, I *KNEW* I was a geek when this kept me laughing for 30+ minutes...laughing so hard I had tears rolling down my eyes and my sides hurt:
Ethernet: A device used to catch the Ether-bunny.
{snerk...hahahahaha}
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Okay, not originally said about ethernet... "How can one little insulated wire bring so much happiness??"
/sig
If you have, you would absolutely, certainly have the initials VC engarined in your mind. These are the overlords that controls your life and owns your soul.
Especially toward the end when all of them were changing from benevolent take-all-you-want piggybanks* to bloodsucking vampires that fires off one coworkers after next with glee**.
*note1: actually, from the beginning it was more like the inverse of beggars: they often *BEGGED* you to take their money if you just had the stupidest business plan involving the word "internet" and "e-commerce."
**note2: okay, I have to admit they didn't want to see the company they have vested interest fail, but toward the end, most VCs took control of their companies directly, and had no quarrals about tossing people out like used rags.
For all the geeks out there - the whole dot-com -> dot-bomb thing taught me one big lesson: unless you make it to upper management or start out on your own (really on your own, i.e. your own capital), you are just a (disposable) pawn in this game.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
in refrence to stealing cable TV.. :)
It's not a choice of photons vs electrons. Ethernet can use optical fibre too.
And I'm glad it's not up to you which technology we use, because the actual tech is only one part of the overall usefulness of a technology. For example, a $100 network card that can do 1gbit/s is more useful to me than a $1000 network card that can do 100 gbit/s. Because I can afford (and justify) the $100 card.
Price matters. Open standards matter. Would we have Ethereal and tcpdump and all the billions of useful network tools that are out there if we were using proprietary standards for networking? I don't think so. Would people get owned due to network stack (or network protocol design) bugs? Seems quite possible.
Try looking a little farther out.
Bob Metcalfe once predicted that the internet would 'gigalapse' due to IP namespace exhaustion and sheer load. It didn't happen.
Bob has made a career out of making an ass of himself with idiotic predictions coupled with a humongous ego. He fancied himself quite clever when he called the free software/open source movement "the open sores movement." Har har! You may have a career with ZDNET yet, Bob.
Hey Bob we thank you for ethernet, but you're still a jerk.
is CSMA/CD . What a brilliant MAC. You just start shouting, check to see if anyone else was shouting, and if they were, wait a random amount of time and start shouting again. It's so simple and stupid that no one would ever think it works.
simon
home page
I wouldn't argue against Ethernet for photons vs. electroncs (see other posts in this thread) but I do have a problem with Ethernet's scalability. The lack of determinism CAN and IS a problem in huge networks.
I'm currently at MIT, and the network in my dorm was put in back when the dorm was first built in the 80s. It's 10-base-T and wholly inadequate for modern use. Random exponential backup is fine for situations where the ether isn't used heavily. It's pretty stupid flow control - if you sense a collision, wait some random period of time and try again. However, when you have a lot of stations transmitting, you get a lot of collisions... fast.
The typical figure for saturation of a medium is around 70% usage. For Ethernet, however, it's more like 38%. As you add stations, it becomes more and more difficult to transmit before you go through your 15 retries and throw out the packet.
When you combine this with TCP's assumptions, you run into some pretty perverse situations. TCP expects a network with 0 packet loss - the ACKs have to get back to the sender within some amount of time or it'll retransmit. When you get huge Ethernet networks with lots of activity, the exponential backup keeps delaying packet delivery until all communications slow to a crawl.
For me, this means having to tolerate 30% packet loss and transfers of around 10 KB/sec through a 10 Mbit network with something like 600 hosts.
The cure to all these problems has been revisions to Ethernet - switches establish an Ethernet link with two hosts between the switch and each port on the switch. It's a workaround to a stupid decision in the Ethernet protocol that's now firmly established and won't ever be changed because of its acceptance.
He makes this rather ignorant comment:
Open source contributors who use the GPL never "give their intellectual property away". Copyrights are very strongly defended; the recent FSF vs OpenTV story is sufficient proof of this. Trademarks are very strongly defended: Linus and RedHat have both defended trademarks. Patents are a sticky mess but even then the GPL doesn't demand that you give up patents; only that you don't use them to restrict or impede licensing. The open source movement is not so stupid as to "give away" code. Strong ownership of intellectual property is at the very core of open source.
The subtle but important distinction is that open source developers want to share their intellectual property. The philosophy is "you may use my IP if I can use yours". This is not giving anything away; it's building a community of cooperation. There is an exchange of value between two parties even though the exchange is not monetary.
I suppose it's possible to argue that BSD zealots are giving their intellectual property away. Yet another reason to avoid the BSD license.
...since I had to fsck with terminating resistors (10base2), vampire taps (10base5) or that crappy stiff ArcNet cable. I still have working setups of each packed away in my basement.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
No, you're kidding me, right?
I can't believe this FUD is still out there after 30 years. Contrary to popular and mis-guided belief, an Ethernet will NOT saturate itself at 37% utilization. Period. Anyone that honestly believes that should give the token ring and ATM salesdroids and spin doctors a great big pat on the back because that's exactly what it is: sales doubletalk and spin from vendors of competing technologies. For christ's sake, this myth was laid to rest in September of 1988 . This FUD relies on over-simplifications of assumptions in the theory and inadequacies in the testing procedures.
I can't believe you'd honestly bring it up. Anyone with even a marginal amount of actual networking experience knows this to be FUD. Next time think before you speak about something you know nothing about.
Metcalfe is a total elitist and he doesnt even know it.
" Linux is based on thirty year old technology, and it hasn't replaced Windows. He's right. You know it."
Windows is based on 30-year old technology and hasn't replaced Unix. In fact, the dominant form of computing 30 years ago was the mainframe. Windows hasn't even replaced that.
It's fun to to go down memory lane sometimes - remember ....
.... you know when one old piece of shit Broken Ring NIC that decides to take a header- could bring a Fortune 500 company to its knees ....
"OMFG! The Network is Beaconing! The Network is Beaconing!"
Ahhh the good old days
Frankly - ArcNet was better!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Linux sucks because it's 30-year old technology even though it's first public release was in 1991 and it doesn't have any ties to any of the heriditary unicies. (Making an assumption about the SCO claim, of course). Well, gee, brilliant. Knock down something simply because it's old. Let me tell you something folks, stop using wheels, old technology, innovate. Cars? 100 year old technology, innovate, come up with something radicly new! Let's face it, either this guy is sleeping with aliens, or he's a hypocrite. Go him!
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
Boggs invented the first (of many) hardware circuit techniques to do collision detection, and other elements of transceiver design. If Dave hadn't picked up a soldering iron, we'd probably be doing DATAKIT or some other telco hack.
...-.-
See:
Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality, David R. Boggs, Jeffrey C. Mogul, Christopher A. Kent .
Ethernet is CSMA/CD, not CSMA. The collision detection mechanism arbitrates access to the medium, it is not there for flow control. Collisions are not bad.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Oh hey, found a Commmunications of the ACM article by Metcalf and Boggs about their early work on Ethernet. Good read.
I wonder how long we can keep this up?
A Pentium processor is 10 somewhere around these days (don't remember exactly ;)
This way carriers will soon be offering ethernet access, without having to abandon their ample investments in SONET.
Expect to hear about this technology a lot in the coming years.
Read more here.
Enter EoS in the searchbox at the upper left.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Kind of like the Jobs-Wozniak team. One gets the glory while the other languishes in realitive obscurity. Were's the Wozniak reality-distortion field?
It's that smokey haze that hovers around him...
Who, Trinity?
God, I love this world.
Bob may well hold passionate and horribly misplaced beliefs, but he is open to arguement and, on occassion, can even change his mind. He also was/is the driving force behind Pop!Tech, an annual brain candy event where the questions around "what does all this tech mean" are addressed. Most people seem to miss that Bob is a provocateur...he *enjoys* annoying the crap out of people and forcing them to defend their often dogmatically (and poorly understood) positions. Mind you, this is not to say that Bob does not also hold some opinions dogmatically...but at least he can defend *why* he hold them. Personally, I like a man (or woman) who takes such pleasure in forcing others to think and defend their positions...in trying to respond to his taunts, deepen the understanding of their own positions, is this a bad thing?. Then again, maybe it is easier just to say that he's a bigmouth...perhaps you can force him to drink the hemlock.
rootrot
--
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-George Bernard Shaw
It would be: Try to drive to your destination, and if you hit someone, go home and try to drive there again. (-:
Someone named an OS for me.
"And the reason that Ethernet won was that Ethernet was an open standard with many competing companies providing it."
Now if only more compnaies would take heed...
And who tends to promote interoperability more than Free Software and Open Source authors?
Some people don't care about the difference, but Bob demonstrated his ignorance by stating that RMS is an "open-source software guru," when Richard doesn't even agree with Open Source. Bob failed to notice that there are idealogical, business, and pleasure (Linus did it just for fun) reasons for Free/Open Source software. In general, Bob's attitude seems to be that the bottom line is all that matters, which is silly, IMHO.
You're not delusional as much as ignorant. First, IPv6 has existed for a number of years. It is not a reinvention, but a an evolution of IP to make it more scalable. Second, the value of IP and the Internet is that they are generic, not burdened by application specific details. There's a reason for the protocol stack: to keep application details at the top.
I didn't know what VC meant until I read the article (which I did before reading comments). Of course, maybe /. posts should be written in such a way that those who haven't read the article look dumb. That would make it easier to weed out a lot of clueless posts.