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?"

Comments

As long as the need for a secure network exists...

[riseoftheindividual]

... the lan isn't going to disappear, at least not in 10 years. Can you imagine IBM, a defense corp, a huge pharma, etc... ditching their lans for wireless? yeah right, not any time soon.

End of the LAN? Not really.

[AltGrendel]

People and businesses will always want to keep some things privately networked.

Or at least, they should, but then people do some pretty stupid things sometimes.

LAN or WAN

[lthown]

doesn't matter what you want to call it, two computers connected to a local router/hub is a LOCAL area network.

Yawn...

[MightyMartian]

Yes yes, and we'll have flying cars and robots cooking our meals.

Prognosticator didn't used to be a synonym for clueless shithead. Thanks to Dvorak, that has changed, and looking at the clueless shitheads he's spawned.

going away?

[gEvil (beta)]

Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?

Not as long as they let me control my own home network...

Re:As long as the need for a secure network exists

[HornWumpus]

It's not LAN vs wireless, it's LAN vs WAN.

Running a WAN without using LANs throughout is nonsense. IIRC a WAN is just bridged LANs by definition. Proposing that all the LANs will have one node is just silly.

Typical Bob Metcalfe of recent years. The man has lost it. Granted I haven't bothered reading anything he's written in a few years.

Re:Well, could it?

[dosh8er]

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!

Lies, Damn Lies, and Token Ring

[ngr8]

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.

Re:WAN, SCHMAN

[markov_chain]

It doesn't work that way, it's more like a game of chicken-- one guy gets a router first, and then everyone else hops on. First hand experience here :)

Re:WAN, SCHMAN

[timeOday]

Imagine if all the people in your apartment had cellphones... Oh, of course they do. And they've all had wireless home phones for 15 years before that. Transponder density doesn't have to be a problem for wireless, it just means you need smarter transponders, and you get to use less power.

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.

Every doorway opens onto a freeway?

[dazedNconfuzed]

That reasoning amounts to expecting every doorway from every room to open onto a major automotive freeway.

LANs will survive indefinitely precisely because sometimes your data is just feet or yards away ... and because even Internet backbones can't handle the load of routing data for everyone's personal networked printers, storage servers, and media terminals.

Reliability

[KalvinB]

Until WAN routers are cheap and reliable, it won't happen. I've had the same $30 Netgear router I've had for 5 years without any issues. My Belkin wireless router can't go a day without being unreliable. The Mac Mini had a hard time connecting to web-sites until we switched from wireless to LAN.

When you need 100% uptime you can go with a $30 router or spend significantly more than that for a wireless router and network card that won't ever drop your connection.

I'll keep my wires thank you very much.

NAT != Firewall.

[SanityInAnarchy]

There's nothing more to say to you until you get that one, crucial point: Firewalls do not have to be NATs, and NATs don't have to firewall. And you need a firewall whether or not you have a NAT.

Once you do, understand that NAT is a brutally ugly hack. It's much easier and more powerful to simply be able to open a firewall port than to have to forward ports.

And you do need a firewall on your computer -- that, or just turn services off. If you don't do one of the two, wireless will bite you someday.

Re:Well, could it?

[sm62704]

I agree, it's a stupid statement. Ethernet may be superceded by newer technologies, but there will always be uses for a local network.

Some networks, for example, should never be connected to the internet in any way.

Re:WAN, SCHMAN

[snowraver1]

I think that the author is suggesting that each device will have it's own address (IPv6) and will be connected to the internet directly (possibly VIA shared modem, but with unique addresses). Sure you might only have one pipe coming into your house, but each device has a direct connection to the internet.

That being said, I completely disagree with the author. There is no way that companies want to put all thier servers (not to mention clients) directly on the Internet. Firewalls will always exist for security reasons, and thus so will LANs.