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The History of Ethernet
Z34107 tips an article at Ars about the history of ethernet, from its humble beginnings at Xerox PARC in the mid-'70s, to its standardization and broad adoption, to the never-ending quest for higher throughput. Quoting:
"It's hard to believe now, but in the early 1980s, 10Mbps Ethernet was very fast. Think about it: is there any other 30-year-old technology still present in current computers? 300 baud modems? 500 ns memory? Daisy wheel printers? But even today, 10Mbps is not an entirely unusable speed, and it's still part of the 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet interfaces in our computers. Still, by the early 1990s, Ethernet didn't feel as fast as it did a decade earlier. Consider the VAX-11/780, a machine released in 1977 by Digital Equipment Corporation. The 780 comes with some 2MB RAM and runs at 5MHz. Its speed is almost exactly one MIPS and it executes 1757 dhrystones per second. (Dhrystone is a CPU benchmark developed in 1984; the name is a play on the even older Whetstone benchmark.) A current Intel i7 machine may run at 3GHz and have 3GB RAM, executing nearly 17 million dhrystones per second. If network speeds had increased as fast as processor speeds, the i7 would today at least have a 10Gbps network interface, and perhaps a 100Gbps one."
In fact, unless you are playing battlefield or photoshop, those processing cores and all their clock cycles are not being used.
DHCP is, unfortunately, still in full glaring view. An address assignment protocol that doesn't let the server force a new address? Who does that?!
...does not feel much faster than my MacPlus, because operating system and software makers managed to slow everything down again using "advanced software engineering techniques."
10Mbps was huge at the time. It was much faster (proportional to need) than any of the other components in a computer system. So it's not really surprising that it hasn't quite kept pace. Many home networks are still 10Mbps, and that's plenty for two or three computers.
Q: is there any other 30-year-old technology still present in current computers?
What about SCSI? or RS-232? not as omnipresent as Ethernet but still more or less common. Happy birthday Ethernet, but you are not the only remaining dinosaur...
Keyboards? The plug on the end changed...the keys stayed the same.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
Besides, most people will have rich content like Encarta delivered on CD-ROMs at home, or from the file server at the office using LAN Manager. They'll have information at their fingertips, that's the road ahead.
It's hard to believe, but how many of you fuckers were even born yet in the early 1980s?!
10Mbps is not an entirely unusable speed? That's .... Fast Ethernet!
you are a refreshing troll, keep up the good work !
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
if the situation needs, I got pissed off at our IT dude trying to bounce a wifi signal over 5 repeaters though real 3 hour fire walls and steel beams, I swiped a box of cat3 out of the storage closet and even though its 10mbs, that's 10x faster than our internet and I don't have to hear "my email doesn't work" 50 fucking times a day
Did you really just explain "Dhrystone" to us?
One is 30 years old, the other is almost 30 years old, and both are still available for many PCs. Yes, I know most don't come with a floppy drive, but if you really want to hook one up, you still can with most systems (not all). The keyboard port, serial port, centronics port are all equally old. Molex connectors are too.
I can think of a lot of 30 year old technology still in common use today...
.... was the loading of a still image.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
If you have a bad cable/connector, 10MB/s can be much more reliable than 100MB/s.
In the 1980s, ethernet tended to be over Thinnet or Thicknet. I seem to recall speeds of 1-3Mbps over those technologies. Twisted pair came out somewhere around 1990 at 10Mbps.
Today I mostly use 1Gps, but deal with servers that are 10G.40G and 100G will be standard in datacenters in a few years.
The blurb indicates that Ethernet is the only technology that we are using from 30 years ago. Back then all the machines I used had Memory, cpus, displays, and keyboards. The particualr technology changed - just like Ethernet technology's changes.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
10Mbit is still faster than my internet connection. I wouldn't complain, but it seems every streaming site assumes I have at least 5 Mbit and I only have about 1.5. It's amusing to me, because we still have problems with broadband penetration in many parts of the USA and 1.5Mbit is equivalent to the standard T1 speed that many small to medium businesses still use for their WANs.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
i know there are applications that need it but when it came time to look at 10gbps where i work only backups seemed to benefit from it. then we would need to buy all new servers as well.
even our busiest database servers that process tens of millions of requests a day used a few Mbps on average at any given time. they love their 5600 series xeons and 72GB of RAM in them, but don't really need faster networking
Fuck off, you off-topic quack.
Colloidal silver will save us all!
Also get rid of all technology because EM is draining your soul....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
H. L Mencken you figured out back in 1924.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That's all I'm saying. (Shudder!)
I opened my mind, weighed up all the evidence I could find, and concluded you're full of shit.
>is there any other 30-year-old technology still present in current computers?
Yup it is called SCSI. Now in both parallel (going away) and its serial form (SAS).
True. And if 10 MBit/full-duplex isn't working for you, you can always chop that down to 10 MBit/half-duplex if needbe.
I'm gonna link to this on my Gopher! I'll send it up on my uucp upload tonight!
Supply and demand addresses this. We simply do not need a great deal of network speed at this time. For years network bandwidth stagnated simply because no one had a burning need to do more with it. Then our workstations became capable of processing more data faster, thus we moved from 100mbit to 1gig over a very short period of time.
I'd be willing to bet that there is a correlation between HD sizes and network bandwidth, now that I think about it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Think about it: is there any other 30-year-old technology still present in current computers?
The power cable in a modern desktop is almost identical to ones used 20-30 years ago. Should we be amazed that newer power supplies manage to get more and more power through a cord that was designed so long ago?
Serial port - slightly improved over 1980 serial ports, but still compatible
Parallel port - slightly improved over early-1980s parallel port, but still compatible
Keyboard - DIN8 instead of DIN5 and different layout and "softer," but otherwise similar to 1980. Still compatible with a cheap adapter.
Video output connector - VGA, circa 1987, but improved in many ways. Still compatible.
DVD burner - the "cd read" functionality came to computers in the late 1980s, to music several years earlier. Can still read early-80s-standard music CDs.
Oh, and it gets even better:
Hard drive - descended from hard drives in the 1960s. SATA protocols descended from SCSI protocols dating from '80s or earlier.
Power supply - many components are technically equivalent to pre-1980s tech.
Screws, fans, and other case hardware - basic tech predates moon landing.
Standard-shape AC power cable dates back farther than I can remember.
Some other computers of this vintage have built-in floppy and PATA ports. PATA descended from the old IDE standard of the late 1980s or very early 1990s. I don't know if it maintained compatibility or not. On some recent computers you can still run a vintage-early-80s 5 1/4" floppy drive through the motherboard's floppy adapter.
I could go on but I'll stop here.
Hey, if it works, it's efficient, and it's cheap, there may not be any reason to improve it. I don't know about you, but one of my favorite data-recording devices is a pencil and notepad, both of which predate the moon landing by far.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That 10Mbps Ethernet was hella fast at the time.
Remember, everything was text. No fancy graphics or sounds (except for the single beep tone) ... so a terminal wired right into the mainframe at 9600 baud on a serial line was an absolutely screaming connection. Most people couldn't read at the scroll rate of 9600 baud anyway.
Hell, in 1988 when I started university, we still used line editors ... oddly enough, I think it actually was on a VAX 11/780. With a line editor, a 300 baud modem was a usable speed. My connection from home on dialup was every bit as good as the VT52's in the lab, which was good.
Back then, a 360K floppy held a lot of data, and nobody could figure out what you'd do with the 650MB of a CD. Docs were smaller, and the total amount of data we owned was a tiny fraction of what is now one or two MP3s.
I routinely chuckle at the fact that I've personally paid $700 for 16MB of RAM and $350 for a 325MB hard drive ... now I've got 8GB of RAM and a total of 6TB of disk space in my home computer. My first computer had 16K of RAM, and a CPU speed measured in kHz (single digit).
I think the fact that Ethernet is still around is a testament to the fact that it was a well designed protocol from the beginning, and it has been able to scale.
I can only wait to see what kind of wacky stuff we'll be running in just a few years ... and I'm pretty sure there will still be an 802.x transport layer. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It so happens that it's the fastest way to move music onto my Empeg Car MP3 player.
The player also has a 12mbps "full speed" USB port, but software/packet overhead actually make it slower than using the 10mbps Ethernet port. And I don't even want to think about moving gigs of music onto the player via the provided RS232 port...
The fan in your desktop PC hasn't changed much since then. (It's a lot different from your laptop fan, or the fans in a VAX 11/780.) And the VAX didn't "come with 2MB" of RAM or have a speed of about 1 MIPS. The canonical definition of 1 MIPS was "as fast as a VAX 11/780", and you could get different amounts of RAM; mine had 4MB in two cabinets. Princeton University's Massive Memory Machine Project later had a VAX 11/785 with 128 MB of RAM, so they could experiment with what you could do if you had "enough" memory (128MB wasn't really quite enough, but it was all you could fit in a VAX expanded to 10 cabinets. :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If network speeds had increased as fast as processor speeds, the i7 would today at least have a 10Gbps network interface, and perhaps a 100Gbps one.
This sounds similar the the "If cars improved like computers" joke.
Time to offend someone
If network speeds had increased as fast as processor speeds, the i7 would today at least have a 10Gbps network interface, and perhaps a 100Gbps one."
If ISPs were not trying to screw their customers out of every penny 10G networks WOULD be common place.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Of course, 9600 baud was really fast back then, and some of them today use 115200 instead. You could crank a Unibus up to 9600 or maybe even 19200 if you had the I/O processor card (KMC?).
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm with you. I think the guy's a genius. Better than the Recipie Troll, Helen Keller and the SCO licensing guy all rolled into one. Dr. Bob is funny, on-topic (in his hilariously off-topic way) and damn smart. Plus, he's somehow got a gift for frist-psotting, as well. I hope he keeps visiting us for a long time to come.
Mods, Dr. Bob deserves an "informative"!
The VAX-11/780 was priced at something like $200,000.
If you buy a comparable computer today, getting 10Gbps interconnects would certainly be a reasonable option.
I didn't know the i7 cpu even had an ethernet interface; I thought it was the motherboard or the add-on card that gave me my network connection. huh, learn something new everyday
-SaNo
Microchips, circuit boards, wires,fans,steel, plastic, audio jack sockets, keyboards, speakers, LEDs, On/off switches
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop
I used to play a game called "Harpoon 2" (a naval warfare sim) on the original Pentium. Once more than a few contacts were present, it was dog slow. Slow to the point where you'd make some moves, enter, then go get a cup of coffee while the machine thought for a few minutes. Game time would advance by 30 seconds. Repeat. Later I loaded it up on a P4, and was pleasantly surprised to find the game was actually playable.
And that experience was not unique to that one application - just about any application that felt slow on older machines was pretty snappy by the time P4's rolled out. Intel, AMD, et al, simply threw speed at the problem faster than developers could soak it up. I'm hard pressed to think of ANYTHING I use on a routine basis that really bogs the machine down, and that certainly didn't used to be the case. Sure, those folks who do stuff like 3d rendering and similar very computationally intense tasks are still feeling the need for more speed, but really: you wouldn't have even been able to do that stuff on older machines. That's not a case of code bloat.
Over the years I have had the misfortune of listening to Bob Metcalfe shameless claim to be the inventor of Ethernet, and held my tongue out of some combination of embarrassment for Bob, and timidity on my part. Years before that first misfortune, I had the great fortune to speak with David Boggs for some time. He patiently explained the theory behind this new technology, why it was better than others, token-bus, for example, and so forth. So, when this article says "invented by Bob Metcalfe and others" it fails to include the guy whose name appears on the patent with Bob, and is listed first, I believe. I am delighted to see Ethernet evolve so well, and there is room for a lot of fun discussion about how it morphed into what it is, but when we think of this, we should try to honor all the major contributors, especially when they are the technical genius behind the idea. Shame on you Bob. What would your Mother say?
"Bloat" implies useless or unnecessary growth in file size, which is just not what we're talking about here. Sure, simple text files were nice and small, but they were... simple text files. What's your solution? That people stop exchanging pictures, video, and rich text? The tl;dr version of your post: you kids get off my lawn.
You are a quack and I feel sorry for anyone who ever takes seriously any words you say.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Most POS credit card terminals still use 300 baud modems to dial in.
Why?
They don't have to transmit a lot of data to authorize a transaction, and 300 baud modems will work reliably on the crappiest phone lines.
I'd be very interested to see where you can get a current (by which I mean less than about a year old) computer with RS-232 or SCSI interfaces. SCSI was never all that widespread, at least in the PC (vs. Mac) world - I used to own a lot of SCSI gear, and always had to buy interface card. And I haven't seen a new computer with a serial port in many, many years.
Over the years I have had the misfortune of listening to Bob Metcalfe shameless claim to be the inventor of Ethernet, and held my tongue out of some combination of embarrassment for Bob, and timidity on my part. Years before that first misfortune, I had the great fortune to speak with David Boggs for some time. He patiently explained the theory behind this new technology, why it was better than others, token-bus, for example, and so forth. So, when this article says "invented by Bob Metcalfe and others" it fails to include the guy whose name appears on the patent with Bob, and is listed first, I believe. I am delighted to see Ethernet evolve so well, and there is room for a lot of fun discussion about how it morphed into what it is, but when we think of this, we should try to honor all the major contributors, especially when they are the technical genius behind the idea. Shame on you Bob. What would your Mother say?
when I could look this and other things up without loading a ton of ads and other crap why would i go to ars to read it?
see all the info on ethernet i could want on a single page.. why would i want to go to ars and read it?
I was recently helping my parents pick out a new hub at bestbuy since they needed one solely to add an ethernet port to their network for their tivo to plug into. Speed didn't really matter since it was just for getting subscription data. When we went and found the wired networking stuff they had exactly 2 to choose from. An $80 gigabit switch and a $30 10Base-T switch. Not a 10/100 hub or switch, just a 10Base-T one. I had no idea they still made these lol.
I don't know about you but when was the last time you saw a Ethernet card etc that was just 10mbs and not 10/100? almost all cards built since the early 90's all support 100mbs some were even gigabit. most switches are 10/100 but almost none are just 10. 10 is just to slow for most things 100mbs is plenty.
Absolutely agree. Dr Bob is the best troll I've seen on Slashdot for ages. Just when I thought proper trolling was a dying art, he comes along. His posts are well written and self-consistent, and you can almost believe that he's sincere. He consistently gets a large number of replies, indicating that a lot of people are still fooled, every time. Exactly how a troll should be.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
When you give false hope to HIV sufferers then you are very likely to lead someone down a false path of recovery that could easily lead to that persons death.
You are worse than a troll. You are dangerous.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
here is..."ludicrous speed".
Now this really dates me. But in 1975, I got a tour of Xerox PARC when I was taking a summer course in computer architecture at UC Santa Cruz. Alan Kay showed us some of the early Alto machines. They were still having trouble getting a smooth phosphor coating on the custom-made page-sized CRTs. We saw the PARC 3mb/s Ethernet, which Kay described as "an Alohanet with a captive ether," the first networked file server, and the first networked laser printer. It was clear this was the future, if the price could come down by about a factor of 10. Kay was hoping that some day a workstation might cost as little as a grand piano.
At Ford Aerospace, I was responsible for putting in the first Ethernet, around 1981. It was mostly "thick Ethernet" at 10mb/s. Ethernet cables weren't standard items, but Ford Aerospace routinely built cables for satellite ground stations, so we had the appropriate cables made up and pulled through the telephone ducts run through the building's concrete floors. I checked out a time-domain reflectometer from the measurement equipment pool and took a look at the cable. Cables ended in PL-239 coax connectors, and sections were joined with a barrel. The Ethernet tranceivers had SO-239 connectors on both ends, so the cable went through them. We used a vampire tap once or twice, but it didn't work out as well. The TDR showed a transceiver as generating almost no reflections. But bending the cable tighter than a 1' radius caused a noticeable impedance mismatch.
We were bothered that coax Ethernet wasn't a balanced system. There's a DC component to the signal, which means you can't use decoupling capacitors between sections to get rid of hum. We spent time on grounding issues and looked at the cable signal with scopes a lot. Repeaters were very expensive then, and we were trying to avoid them.
The network interfaces were mostly 3Com boards. Our original network consisted of a PDP 11/70, a PDP 11/45, a VAX 11/780, and a PDP 11/34 used as a gateway to a 9600 baud leased line "backbone link" to Ford HQ in Dearborn MI. We later added four Sun 2 workstations and a Sun server. Everything ran TCP/IP. Ford HQ had a similar link to Ford Aerospace in Colorado Springs,which had an ARPANET IMP. So we could get to the ARPANET over a 9600 baud shared backbone. We could FTP files instead of mailing tapes! I used to Telnet into Stanford's machines over that link.
I did a lot of work on 3COM's TCP/IP implementation, which originally was totally incapable of coping with a mix of speeds in the network. That's why I have those RFCs on network congestion with my name on them. This was before telephone de-regulation, and that 9600 baud leased line was expensive.
The article mentions that "There used to be a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the performance impact of collisions." There was a period around 1984-1990 when coax Ethernet performance in practice was much worse than theory predicted. The problem was finally figured out by Wes Irish at Xerox PARC. It turns out that the defective design of a SEEQ Ethernet interface chip was causing the problem. As the state machine of the chip transitioned at the end of receiving a packet, there was a period of a few nanoseconds when the chip momentarily turned on the transmitter power, jamming the coax for a few nanoseconds. This reset the "quiet time" timer on all the other stations on the cable, causing them to ignore any following packet for several microseconds, after which they dropped back to the proper "look for sync" state. Back-to-back packets thus lost the second packet, which caused retransmissions and killed performance, but didn't show up as a "collision" to the controll
Especially if you are stuck with a mis-wired cable. I had a problem where unbeknownst to me, the middle two pair were wired side by side instead of split; it would attempt to connect forever but not establish a connection until forcing the adapter to use half-duplex mode (talk about feeling sheepish when I finally figured out the problem).
The Xerox Parc standard was 3 MBps (actually something like 2.96 MBps). The actual throughput was lower because the cards didn't include DMA, and yet this technology sufficed through the early 1980s.
The question of whether network has kept pace with computing is a good one. I would think that the throughput requirements are dependent on the application and not the speed of the computer. Current networking seems to deal fine with high resolution video streaming and application transfer in spite of the speed of the host computer. Yes I have 4 3Ghz cores on my laptop, but most of that is power consumed by compiling and virtual machines. My TV set with its 1 Ghz MHz ARM processor does well with the 150 MBps wireless connection for video and data.
Me thinks Ms. Perlman is now out of touch on the subject? My employer has been doing MLPPP - multi-link point-to-point (trill) for some time now.
All this talk about the original ethernet spec.. Who remembers (and worked with) ArcNet? The company I worked for in 1987 did quite a few installs of the then VERY new Novell Netware 2.1. The platforms were Compaq 286 desktops with 2MB of ram, a 300MB ESDI drive, and an ArcNet network interface card, and ran NW in "non-dedicated" mode, meaning someone used the system also as a workstation. The fun part of setting those systems up was running a utility called "Compsurf" on the drive, sort of a disk tester/low level formatter combo. We started compsurf on Fri evening just before going home, and it was just finishing up Mon morning... Also loved (NOT) the address dipswitches on the Arcnet cards that were so easy to get wrong... Ah memories...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Copy a 500GB system image to a NAS over 10Mbit and get back to me (should take about 4.7 days).
That's why several recent backup tools do the copying gradually in the background, even if it does take days. Consider that most people's connections to the Internet aren't substantially faster than 10 Mbps, making the connection between the LAN and the Internet the bottleneck in a remote backup. (Those with the 100 Mbps connection are outliers, not part of the mainstream that enjoys economies of scale.)
> But even today, 10Mbps is not an entirely unusable speed
10 Mbps is what I receive at home, so when I share among local machines -- pls correct me if I am wrong -- 100 Mbps Ethernet (or even 54 Mbps wi-fi) is more than enough.
Yet I have trouble to watch videos -- besides site congestion -- probably because the ISP is playing some dirty QoS tricks on me.
Other less frequent situations will become a problem in the near future when I get my act together and assemble a fileserver. Also, I came to the conclusion a network boot might be a lot faster than a live CD -- specially on intranets and compared to older CD drives. If anyone can corroborate this opinion of mine, I'd be thankful.
See (at the end): http://www.lyberty.com/tech/terms/usb.html
"By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out."
- Richard Dawkins
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
agreed, Dr. Bob is doing it right.
The only enhancement I can come up with would be to branch out into homepathy. That really gets the nerds in a lather.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
you're out there, man... in the Ether(net). You should try some Hash.
mind you, most of the people on /. can easily research this information and verify/debunk whatever the Dr. is trying to claim.
Well, not only do I still have a 10 Mbit/s hub in use on my network at home, I do also type this on a 27 years old keyboard: a good old IBM Model M. Buckling spring switches over membrane. Not only these things are made to last but they also provide an incredible tactile feedback which touch-typist typically love. To "beat" such a keyboard you have to shell out bucks for some Cherry MX keyboards or some Topre (like the Happy Hacking Pro 2).
a 50 year old 3 prong, grounded electrical cord which is interchangeable with all kinds of technology.
And, I traveled in asia with a descendent of the guy who invented the screw in light bulb.
Nobody has mentioned the absurd price of early ethernet implementations. There is good reason why it took forever to catch on. It took a cost plus military budget to afford it.
Well Dr Bob the fact that you think you can cure diseases like kidney problems and cancer by tweaking someone's back? It kinda makes you a bit of a loony.
As for TFA? if it ain't broke why the hell fix it.Ethernet works. It works damned well, it works no matter the OS, it works across hardware manufacturers without needing any funky drivers. Frankly that is more than i can say for sound, graphics, hell even certain southbridges are more fiddly than Ethernet. And I can take this 10 year old former school PC I have sitting in front of me, plug it into a 2 year old router and transfer files from my 1 year old desktop. That's nice.
So personally I say "Go Ethernet!" as year after year you remain the same rock solid standard I can count on, without needing dongles and adapters and all the other bullshit. Now if only we could get whomever is in charge of video outputs to make up their damned mind, between the DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort ARGH!! Just pick one and make it fricking universal already!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
So you say you don't have dual bonded 10Gb Ethernet on your i7? Pity.
Back then 10Mb/s was the high end, today multiple 10Gb/s are. So we have a factor of >1000 here too.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Just not super-cheap: http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Myricom-Myri-10G-network-adapter/1824423.aspx
Heck, some such movies even had a twist ending. The late Richard Jeni once joked about loading pornography on dial-up: "All right, all right, good boobs, all right, come on- PENIS! Oh, God!"
I have an old Pathoclast that I'm restoring. I'm just not sure how to tell if it's actually working.
It will be donated to the James Randi Educational Foundation's new LA headquarters when the move is complete.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I don't understand the point of this, there are 10 Gbps NICs available, just because you don't invest on them, doesn't mean they don't exist.
The cheapest 10/100 cards you can get for some 10€, but a 10 Gbps NIC seems to cost around 500€.. Sure, you might think that's a lot of money, but a Core i7 970 @ 3.2 GHz costs just as much, and as a comparison you can also get the cheapest CPUs for around 30€ and they probably won't reach the same dhrystone scores as the Core i7 either..
However, most people don't have those Core i7 970s either, just like they don't have the 10Gbps NICs..
Also, the 3GB of RAM you mentioned is not really that top-notch these days, my medium-high end desktop has 6GB and supports up to 24GB of triple channel DDR3..
I'll bet the author of this article was born after 1980 and didn't experience these things first hand like many of us did. This is another article in a series where kids discover older technology and wonder how we got anything done.
Let's have an article about the room at General Motors in the 50s where the 100+ clerks handled accounts payable invoices. The guy I talked to was responsible for vendors starting with JA through JG. Do we really care?
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Holy moly!
I heard of this stuff in the past but never gave it much thought since. Just googled it and found lots of crap, but this video takes the cake.
Thanks!
Trolling is a art,
Just this morning I used an hour moving around my almost $200 three antenna wireless router (D-Link) and managed to get download speeds jumping between 1 and 20 Mbit every other second with an average of about 10 Mbit as the best case. The client is the only connected to the router and is located about 7 meters from the router, with two brick walls between them. If I wasn't leasing I would drill holes around the entire flat and lay CAT6 and throw all POS wireless routers out the window. Even this 30 years old tech is multiple times better than 802.11b/g/n.
Just be glad that someone invented it! Worked at a company that started with a few engineers and a handful of Macintosh IIx machines on AppleTalk. When we grew to a 10-way AppleTalk network, it was pitifully slow. One day, Joe (his real name ;-), came back with a StarNet controller/hub. A bit of twisted pair later, we had a fast network once again! Not sure exactly how close to Ethernet that was, but it was sure faster than AppleTalk! Later migrated to 10Base-T (and were outraged when Apple's Quadra machines arrived and needed a 10Base-T AAUI adapter costing another 100 bucks!). Having to support multiple kinds of transceivers, including coax probably slowed down the adoption of Ethernet technology. Coax had lots of connector issues, something I still see with my Cable TV installation every now and then. These days, I only use 1000Base-T, because packet LATENCY is much lower, and much of the time that's probably more important than overall throughput being higher. Sure, wireless is constantly evolving and almost can't be avoided with modern mobile devices, but fast wired still seems far more reliable.
$2600 in the 80s is probably worth about $10,000 now, or more.
Using the CPI for inflation, it would be approximately $6788 in 2010 dollars if you are calculating from 1980 or it would be $4512 if you start at 1989.
Can you imagine spending even $5k for a computer now? Or $2k?
Umm, yes. Have you looked at the price of a Macbook Pro? It's not remotely difficult to spec out a Windows or Mac computer that costs significantly more than $2000, and $5000 is not that hard to get to either. Fortunately there is often no need to spend that much but it's not hard to imagine.
Most informative post in this whole discussion.
They were essentially similar to early USB:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer#Links
"The basic design of the transputer included serial links that allowed it to communicate with up to four other transputers, each at 5, 10 or 20 Mbit/s -- which was very fast for the 1980s. Any number of transputers could be connected together over even longish links (tens of metres) to form a single computing "farm"."
For a time in the 1980s, with five transputers (four borrowed), using a link endpoint to drive a robot, I had the fastest (or maybe second fastest) computer (cluster) on Princeton's University's campus (in a robotics lab I managed). But it was awkward to program it in Occam. And eventually I had to return the borrowed transputers.
What the transputers could have become... Sad they ended up in the dustbin of history...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
OOOHH!! OOOHH! Yes! Or aroma therapy!!!
BTW you have to be careful about forcing full duplex modes because forcing a mode often disables autonegotion. So if you force 10 megabit full duplex on your computer and connect it to an unmanaged switch (or a managed switch in autonegotiation mode) you are very likely to end up with a duplex mismatch (since in the absense of autonegotiation information the unamanged switch will assume half duplex)
Duplex mismatches in ethernet result in a line that sorta works but with appalling performance.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
In your otherwise observant post, you had the line "Gate's Law: Every 18 months the speed of software halves." If this were true, the speed of modern software would be comparable to that of any other point in computer history. In truth, the rate of slowing is slightly in excess of that of hardware driven speed gains. I would suggest the next version of your post should read "Gate's Law: Every 16 months the speed of software halves".
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Large corporate telecoms have been fleecing the taxpayer subsidies for 30 years without the return of said corporations promise to make their infrastructures better (ie wire the country with fiber)..
Yes, great milestone.