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The History of Ethernet

Posted by Soulskill on from the facilitating-the-internets dept.

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."

4 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Ethernet was over-specced by PhilHibbs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Ethernet was over-specced by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think you're missing the OP's point. When (10Mb) Ethernet was specced, 500GB was more data storage than there was on the planet, and by a lot, not by a little. In a way, 10Mb/s is like the 32-bit IP address thing, it was way-mega overkill at the time, but seems kind of puny today on a global scale, yet still works perfectly adequately on small to medium sized networks.

    2. Re:Ethernet was over-specced by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Nope. enjoy the same speeds because 95% of the sites on the internet are connected to a pipe that is far slower than 10mbps.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  2. Re:Yet my i7... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm guessing that cool toys like "Actual memory protection so that the stability of the system doesn't depend on every last scrap of code behaving itself", "Not having to use a 512x324 display", and "Not costing $2600" probably help dull the pain a bit...