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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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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
Wow, it's been 30 years already, and i *still* haven't managed to get my mitts on a set of RJ45 crimpers...
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
What's VC stand for?
Venture Capitalist. People and institutions invest large sums of money into the funds run by his partnership. He then decides how to invest that money in other companies - usually high tech. startups. Its risky but potentially high reward, depending on how successful the companies he invests in become.
Sailing over the event horizon
An interesting but old article on wired about Metcalfe here: The Legend of Bob Metcalfe
Apparently the old adage "A fool and his money are soon venture capital" does not apply here :-)
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
VietCong
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.
Um. The fact that it was completely wrong.
Today of course we have the benefit of hindsight, but his predictions made are wrong. Win2k did not kill linux and in fact the linux server market share increased since.
Duh.
Ventriloquist Cheater
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.
Before 1993 or so and the advent of Switched Ethernet, Ethernet would melt down under the weight of its own traffic. 40% traffic for Ethernet is an emergency situation. I've seen TR networks hum along with 80-90% utilization and the users barely know.
Token Ring has built-in QoS. It has several levels of error monitors. These are things that are kind of added by switches, but are not a fundamental part of the topology. And if you don't have a *good* switch, you don't even have that.
Of course, in the early 90's Ethernet cards were under $100 and Token Ring cards were $400. *That's* why Ethernet won. Not speed: TR was doing 16MBit when Ethernet could only do 10, and remember, I can acually *get* 16Mbit from TR, instead of 4Mbit with Ethernet. Today, with good switches, I don't miss TR too much. But before switches...
Maybe that's why many, many very large organizations were using TR even into the early '90's. Try running 300 computers on unswiched 10Mbit Ethernet (the best Ethernet had then)...
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
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.
I wonder what would be the world without Ethernet? Would Internet begin and survive just on UUCP/SLIP/PPP?
Would you rather be stuck with Token Ring?
I mean, IBM is a great innovator to be sure. But token ring, IMHO, was one of their great misses.
There's token rings and there's token rings. Saying "Token Ring" when you mean "IBM's Token Ring" is like saying "DOS" when you mean "Microsoft's Disk Operating System".
My guess is that, in the absense of the invention of Ethernet's listen/transmit/back off on collision model, we'd have bootstrapped up from Datapoint's ARCnet.
Like IBM's protocol, ARCnet is also a token ring. But unlike IBM, ARCnet's transport layer is broadcast. So it combines the self-healing characteristics of Ethernet with the delivery-time and latency guarantees of token rings.
ARCnet did have a downside - limited number of addresses on a segment. But there are ways around that. (My favorite is my own variant which I call "bumblenet", involving an aborted binary search for the next station to get the token.)
But for radio, Ethernet-like low-level protocols have a distinct advantage over token rings: They suffer less from the "hidden transmitter" issue - where some devices can hear each other and others can't.
Ethernet-like protocols get their packet through if the transmitter and receiver can hear each other and nobody else within their earshot is talking. So a pair of stations on THIS side of the hill can swap a packet at the same time a pair of stations on the OTHER side are swapping one, without explicitly negotiating about it over relays through other stations - or even knowning about stations on the other side of the hill.
Token rings can work around a hill - even if you have a sparse chain of stations where each can only hear two neighbors. But there's a lot more effort involved. They only get simple when either everybody hears everybody else or everybody talks to exactly two neighbors in a closed ring.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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
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.
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.
vulture capitalist
Actually, TCP doesn't expect 0% packet loss at all. It expects an unreliable data path.
The problem here, as you subsequently covered, is that ethernet backs off and handles its own retransmission. This screws with the TCP timers.
If you could turn off the ethernet retransmission then TCP would still work just fine.
But yes, unswitched ethernet sucked when you had many stations trying to move large amounts of data. Token ring (and ATM!) _did_ handle load better but was much more costly.
(My DEC friends commonly refer to Ethernet as "cheapernet" with a little curled tongue action.. eww.)
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.
...-.-
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.