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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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'But it won out and became the the dominant local area networking (LAN) technology for businesses, en route to its place in the Internet, besting a long series of what Metcalfe today calls networking "Godzillas."'
Why not "King Kongs"?
Does anybody know if NetBSD has been ported to this yet?
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
? maybe....
posting first on /.
nigs.
first, plaese God.
Great... 30 years of the internet, and now I can buy virtual crack
What's VC stand for?
I read the article and still don't quite get it
!!!!bitches you it eaT
Not surprisingly, he's now a VC
whoa! the inventor of ethernet has been elected vice chancellor?!
when did that happen?
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
not first, and a lame attempt at posting something insightful. open your mouth wide for VOMIT
VC - abbr.
1. vice chancellor.
2. vice consul.
3. Victoria Cross.
4. Vietcong.
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[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. 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
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
You guys just slashdotted C|Net.
An interesting but old article on wired about Metcalfe here: The Legend of Bob Metcalfe
What's that flying thing in the sky?" I said to myself as I watched a huge howling blob shoot through the sky at what looked like a comfortable cruising alttitude of 10,000 feet. It soon was all over CNN that CowboyNeal had given up his struggle with weight watchers and jumped off the side of a deep dark abyss. However in mid-fall he decided that he would try again. He aimed his belly at the ground and when he touched earth he bounced upward at a very high velocity. Later on I decided to take a peek at the crazy tub-o-lard himself. So I infiltrated Slashdot headquarters and he gave me a strange stare when I peaked my head into his office. Boy, he has one crazy lummox!
Join Tor today!
is wiring it's way to a WAN near you. pay attention, that's cheap enough. beware the southern baptist freemason nazi .conspiracIE.
consult with yOUR creator.
"Anyone who runs Windows is a VC! Anyone who runs Linux is a tech-savvy VC!"
"Do you r00t women and children?"
"Sometimes!"
"How can you r00t women and children?"
"Easy! You just don't ping 'em so much!"
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Geeks apprehended in Child Poronography Bust", "Geek publicy shamed after holding girl's hand." "Damn, shower-ridden geeks. They're all alike." But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the geek? Did you ever wonder what made him suck cock, what forces shaped his penis so small, what may have molded him? I am a geek, enter my world. Mine is a world that begins with slashdot. I'm smarter than most of the other moderators, this crap they post bores me. "Damn goatse troll. They're all alike." I'm in by dark, cool basement. I've listened to those people with lives upstairs explain for the fifteenth time how to get some fine pussy. I understand it (not!). "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't take my acne medicine. CowboyNeal ate it." "Damn CowboyNeal. He probably did eat it. They're always gettin eaten by that tub-o-lard." I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me, or feels threatened by me, or thinks I'm a smart ass, or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here. Damn geek. All he does is play games. They're all alike. And then it happened... goatse opened to the world...rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from day-to-day incompetencies is sought...slashdot is found. "This is it...this is where I belong..." I know everyone here...even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again...I know you all...Damn geeks. Stinking up the basement again. They're all alike...You bet your ass we're all alike...we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak (not!)...the bits of meat that you did let slip through were later on stolen by CowboyNeal (true!). We've been dominated by sadists, or eaten by CowboyNeal. The few trolls that have something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert. This is our world now...the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty and the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons (ie, CowboyNeal), and you call us criminals. We explore...and you call us losers. We seek after knowledge...and you call us criminals. We exist without girlfriends, without nationality, without religious bias...and you call us criminals. You have girlfriends, you have suntans, you socialize, fuck, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the losers with friends like CowboyNeal. Yes, I am a geek. My crime is that of a loser. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. I am a geek, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all...after all, we've all got horse cocks (not! perhaps a few).
Join Tor today!
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.
Did you ever do anything useful with your life after you invented ethernet and got rich selling NICs for over $1000 each?
Just so you know why I'm now fucking your wife, I can buy a NIC for something like 10 or twenty bucks.
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...
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.