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LAN Turns 30, May Not See 40?
dratcw writes "The first commercial LAN was based on ARCnet technology and was installed some 30 years ago, according to a ComputerWorld article. Bob Metcalfe, one of the co-inventors of Ethernet, recalls the early battles between the different flavors of LAN and says some claims from the Token Ring backers such as IBM were lies. 'I know that sounds nasty, but for 10 years I had to put up with that crap from the IBM Token Ring people — you bet I'm bitter.' Besides dipping into networking nostalgia, the article also quotes an analyst who says the LAN may be nearing its demise and predicts that all machines will be individually connected to one huge WAN at gigabit speeds. Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?"
Or at least, they should, but then people do some pretty stupid things sometimes.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I used to have a thinnet rg-6 network back in school (10base2)... 2.5MIPS max. Plus you HAD to have a 75ohm terminator on any unused end. Never touched token ring... and from what I hear, a pain! All things considered, the CAT5 spec has been pushed quite a ways, even in the roll-out of CAT6e. These are the types of people that the industry needs. Individuals that can push what we have to the limit (hrmmm... let's twist the wires and then shield them for better resistance against cross-talk, thus improving bandwidth!) I applaud our existing Ethernet Overlords, and welcome the new age of Fiber!
Seriously, that must be the next thing, since copper, or any conductor, has its limitations.. (speed of the electrons, eddy currents, all that fun science...) With the advent of stopping light, quantum computing (vaporware?) fiber must be next... mmmm... everbody needs a little fiber in their diet!
This useless space for sale, inquire at front desk.
Funny. I'd been talking about this MiniTruth and Token Ring phenomena with a friend just the other day. Whilst being all corporate, actually had an IBM SE come up to me and tell me that I was risking my [redacted big honkin company] through the advocacy of Ethernet.
Two months later, at a big conference for all True Believers conducted by IBM, actually heard IBM plants in the audience doing the amen corner thing with Greek Chorus of "alas, Ethernet would kill the King" lines.... up to the "802.3 will make it hurt when you pee" level of nonsense.
The fact that a 3745 [burly iron werken] running remotely was actually running on the backup token ring thingie for a month before it fell over and died because the primary ring had never worked [vague memory of route discovery]was, well, pretty f'n sweet.
IBM's always been a great company, seriously, but the LAN wars were not its finest hour.
Verizon: Latin for "poor rural service".
As long as residential ISPs only let you have 1 IP address, there will be LANs. Maybe they will get more generous with IPv6 (yeah right).
Whatever the limitations of 802.11 may or may not currently be, that doesn't mean much about the long-term prospects of wireless. 10 years ago I would have thought reclaiming the analog TV spectrum would be impossible, now it's happening before our eyes. Outside of a post-nuclear attack scenario, I can't think of any reason to say wireless is inherently unreliable.
No-one uses hubs any more, they all use switches, which are essentially transparent routers anyhow.
No, a better definition is that a LAN has a firewall on the outside.
With IPv4 it was a good definition to say that a LAN has a NAT on the outside (what most people call a router), but with IPv6 NAT is redundant, so instead of a "router/NAT/firewall/DHCP server" box, you just need a "router/firewall/DHCP server" box instead. There's a slight difference that the DHCP server in the former is giving out local addresses (10.*, 192.168.*, etc), and the DHCP server in the second is giving out WAN addresses (the ISP it's connected to will give it a pool of millions instead of a single one as with IPv4), but it makes no real difference (except to simplify routing) as the firewall will block all incoming traffic except replies to outgoing traffic and traffic to explicitly unblocked addresses/ports (equivalent to port forwarding on a NAT router) anyway.
So yes, there will still be LANs, just all the machines in them will have public IPs (though the machines will probably not be accessible publicly because of firewalls).