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An Interview With The Router Man
Angry_Admin writes "For Network World's 20th anniversary, they've published an interview with William (Bill) Yeager, the creator of the multiprotocol router, with some history on how Cisco came to be. As he says in the interview : 'This project started for me in January of 1980, when essentially the boss said, "You're our networking guy. Go do something to connect the computer science department, medical center and department of electrical engineering."' 6 months later he had his first working 3MBit router shoved in a closet."
Look at RFC 675: 16 bits: Destination TCP address
The protocol version number is probably different now. The hardware didn't care about the protocol on top. I worked on converting a system from 3MBit to the new 10MBit ethernet in 1980 but I never knew or cared about IP addresses.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I saw Heron of Alexandria on Discovery a while back. He was quite the mechanical engineer, apparently. One of his inventions, called an "aeolipile", pictured in the Wikipedia article, is the first recorded steam engine. The upshot is that he invented it sometime between 150 BC to 0 AD.
Quoth that article:
the first recorded steam engine, (known as Hero's Engine) which was created almost two millennia before the industrial revolution, which was powered by steam engines. Apparently Hero's steam engine was taken to be no more than a toy, and thus its full potential not realized for quite some time.
My point is that, just because something seems inevitable doesn't mean that it is. People miss the obvious all the time, and due to the most incredibly mundane reasons. If not for inexplicable lack of imagination in an otherwise incredibly imaginative and inventive guy, the industrial revolution could conceivable started in Greece around the time of Christ.
It took almost 2000 years before it was obvious to someone else. Inevitable? Maybe. But it might have been your grandkids' grandkids who created the internet, if this guy hadn't hit the right set of circumstances.
"Just think of an ethernet frame fractured into ATM frames, put into TCP/IP and and sent over the internet, and then having to be converted back."
Well take it from a networking 4 th year Phd. your description of layering and encapsulation is totally wrong. I don't blame you, I blame the ignorant mod who gave you +1.
TCP/IP segment-> ethernet frame or TCP/IP segment-> ATM -> SONET (perhaps) or TCP/IP->MPLS
there is no need to encapsulate ethernet frame in ATM, since in the case of IP traffic both ATM and Ethernet are layer 2 protocols. you either have a 802.3 LAN or point to point ATM links.