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 ;)

Comments

Bigmouth

[Eric Seppanen]

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.

Re:Bigmouth

[OtisSnerd]

One great invention thirty years ago, paired with a huge ego, does not an oracle make.

Tell that to Larry Ellison.

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Re:Bigmouth

[Caligari]

Damn straight. Anyone who makes such non-sensical, inflammatory comments as:

"Stallman and Torvalds would have us return to the time when software was so new that one person working alone could change the world over the weekend. But modern software, [...] is more complicated than that."

Should be ignored at all cost.

Re:Maybe I'm Dumb

[gwernol]

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.

Good Wired Article

[R33MSpec]

An interesting but old article on wired about Metcalfe here: The Legend of Bob Metcalfe

Re:Maybe I'm Dumb

[Beowulf_Boy]

VietCong

Re:The world without Ethernet

[tmasssey]

You're kidding me, right?

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)...