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Ethernet Turns 40
alancronin writes "Four decades ago the Ethernet protocol made its debut as a way to connect machines in close proximity, today it is the networking layer two protocol of choice for local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs) and everything in between. For many people Ethernet is merely the RJ45 jack on the back of a laptop, but its relative ubiquity and simplicity belie what Ethernet has done for the networking industry and in turn for consumers and enterprises. Ethernet has in the space of 40 years gone from a technology that many in the industry viewed as something not fit for high bandwidth, dependable communications to the default data link protocol."
... turns over in its grave.
Break out the BNCs and coax.
Q&A with the inventor: http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/1erztm/table_iama_youre_probably_connecting_to_reddit/
40 years of crappy networking! But at least it was cheap...ish.
" Ethernet is merely the RJ45 jack on the back of a laptop"
When I started using it we had coax cables in daisy chain with 50 Ohm terminators at each end. I never forget spending all day trying to find out why the network was acting flaky, when just for kicks I changed the terminators and it worked. One of them was an open circuit. Go figure... We also had the 3Com 3C501 Ethernet cards the size of a bus (ok a full high/length AT card) which cost $500 each at the time. Ahh the good ole days...
and Boggs made it work.
Get off my lan.
Ethernet's fiber-optic wife left him for Wifi. His kids call the new guy daddy. The child support leaves him living in a run down shithole where he can barely even do 10 Mbps. Life just wasn't what he'd hoped it would be.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
The spec might be 40, but 40 years ago was 1973. You could not buy anything Ethernet that early. None of it was actually available for sale until the early 1980s. I was there; I was involved in early implementations (anyone remember "thick wire" Ethernet, or the early DEC routers and bridges? Kinks and reflections?).
That was actually one of the genius bits of Ethernet. It was designed (DEC, Xerox, and Intel) to do what needed to be done, not what could be done with the available tech. It took a while for the state-of-the-art tech to catch up with the spec. Which is why you couldn't buy any Ethernet equipment until around 1980.
I'm just sayin', that for the people who were there, actually working in the field (not in a Xerox research lab), Ethernet is only around 33 years old. And it sure as hell didn't start out with RJ45 connectors!
"For many people Ethernet is merely the RJ45 jack on the back of a laptop, but its relative ubiquity and simplicity belie what Ethernet has done for the networking industry and in turn for consumers and enterprises."
This is one of the strangest sentences I have encountered in quite a while.
First, "belie" is very definitely the wrong word to use here. It means "to show to be false". And second, Ethernet is ubiquitous largely because of its simplicity... there is nothing surprising about that.
I certainly recall the terminators (named after what they did to your network at the most inopportune times). The cheap screw-on connectors were great, too. They'd work for an arbitrary amount of time, but gradually they'd tarnish or corrode inside, the impedance making the network more and more flaky over time.
Of course, I never had the $500 NICs. I was lucky if I could get my hands on an el cheapo ne2000 clone. :D
TOPS over AppleTalk will never die!
Us old farts who were actually working in the field at the time know you couldn't actually buy any Ethernet equipment until around 1980. I remember installing a "thick wire" LAN using DEC routers / bridges around then. The spec. might be 40, but you sure as hell couldn't buy anything in 1973.
The genius of Ethernet was that DEC, Xerox, and Intel speced out what needed to be done, then went about developing the technology to implement it. Would that that methodology were used more!
Switches in a chip for saving me from collision based hell.
Best regards,
Ethernet
Now, where did I put those LANtastic disks? I need to get this 386SX on the network so I can share its Epson printer.
Where is Zerox ... I mean Xerox these days???
Karma: Bad
Yet another technology created a xerox that they never profited from. Yeah for xerox!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's an 8P8C connector on their laptop, not RJ45.
...but what happens to the bits is almost completely different. The original layer 1 (physical) layer stuff has evolved from the original idea of a shared broadcast medium (thick and thin coax up through the age of hubs) to nowadays being a point-to-point network managed through a centralized intelligent switch. And the layer 2 stuff (data link) evolved from the original spec of 1973 to the notably different 802.2 spec in 1983. In some ways, the great success of Ethernet is that it became the name we gave to whatever technology won out.
as opposed to distant proximity?
Actual content here
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1erq51/youre_probably_connecting_to_reddit_through_a/
You’re probably connecting to reddit through a technology I invented. I’m Bob Metcalfe and I invented Ethernet – AMA
On May 22, 1973 with David R. Boggs, I used my IBM Selectric with its Orator ball to type up a memo to my bosses at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), outlining our idea for this little invention called “Ethernet”, which we later patented.
I worked with the IEEE Standards Association to develop the IEEE 802.3 standard for Ethernet, which specifies the physical and lower software layers. Today Ethernet and the IEEE 802.3 standard are the foundation for today’s world of high-speed communications used in billions of homes and businesses around the world.
I submitted this [1] to the mods awhile back so I could get on the calendar but I figured you’d like to see it, too. Now, ask me anything!
For many people Ethernet is merely the RJ45 jack on the back of a laptop
Laptops have no RJ45 jacks. Nor have desktops. They have 8P8C connectors.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I have a PCMCIA token ring card somewhere. Same physical connector - once spent an hour wondering why it wouldn't connect to an ethernet hub. Because actually looking which card was in there would have been a waste of thirty seconds, right?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Can we reinvent the ethernet jack already? We don't need that bulky Ethernet connector, a thin form factor is more than possible. Make a new connector/jack for new hardware and release cheap adapters for people how can't upgrade their network just yet. Or better yet, made it so we can replace the bulky RJ45 jack with the thinner one, make the tools required for it and what not. Cable can stay the same, just change the damn jack.
This really makes me feel like retiring! I worked at the USAF Global Weather Center (AFGWC) near Omaha in the 1970s where there was this mysterious computer referred to as a TIP which plugged into an even more mysterious ARPANET thing. We'd hang 9-track tapes and ship data back to research and archive centers on the east coast once a day. As a 2nd LT my time was deemed cheap enough to spend babysitting the transfer process (which often broke down). Time flies when you're on the 'net.
We went from 5 Mbit to 10Mbit to 100Mbit to 1000Mbit to 10 Gig in my professional lifetime.
Ethernet cards went from $400, to $200, to $100, to $40 to $15, to basically free.
WHY do I have to beg Google or Verizon to bless me with anything close to this??
The good ol' days - when corporate executives didn't assume that things just worked, and deferred to engineers where decisions required engineering input, instead of cherry-picking answers from their MBA-certified CIO.
One of the things I like about 'The Adolescence of P-1' is the fact that the author charmingly, painfully spelled out every reference to storage capacity in the entire novel.
Those BNCs were pretty tough connectors. When I first got an IT job, the network consisted of two 486s connected via a BNC cable dangled over the carpet across the room. A clumsy co-worker tripped over it and both machines flew off the desks, hit each other in mid air like conkers and crashed onto the floor. The BNC cable and connectors were completely undamaged though.
Consider 10 mbit ethernet on an early PC. It could push maybe 500K/sec. Figure a 4.77 Mhz 8088 had about 2500 K/sec of memory bandwidth. Ratio - 1/5.
Now imagine if the common ethernet on your machine was 1/5th of the Memory bandwidth. Take a PC with 40 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. Imagine having 8 GB/sec over ethernet at a reasonable cost.
Imagine the things we would be doing if we had that. Instead we commonly have 100 MB/sec. 1/40th of the memory bandwidth.
Just think for a minute about how different things would be with a network that pushed 8 GB/sec. You could swap over the network, you could do all kinds of cool things.
So while I really *like* ethernet I wish we hadn't slipped so far down the slippery road of lousy I/O/
Moving information through wires faster than a human being can write and communicate a letter is an invitation to crass waste and lewd pornography.
ARCnet fulfilled its promise to preserve the essential triumphs of human civilization. Through this staid networking protocol that moved with the steady and measured clip-clop of horse-drawn bits, our missive and monograph and manifesto could traverse the landscape at the calm pace of a cultured mind.
Just as the act of serious writing required a deliberation of ink-dipping and quill smoothing, so did ARCnet provide the nation's youth with cheaply wired schools whose nodes tended to work even if adjacent nodes did not.
ARCnet did also provide the engineer and the apprentice with a practical way to demonstrate man's triumph over the ether. Its bursty communications were often audible on the FM and AM radio bands. I spent many a pleasant hour lecturing students on the joy of packets and protocols as I moved from node to note probing with the antenna, its burbles underscoring my words.
When one opened up an ARCnet hub and looked inside to see by what magic connections could be shared and the words of man thus transported, one could instantly and completely grasp its nature.
"See here!" I would lecture, "how the works of man follow the same natural laws as flora and fauna, how the skeletal network branches out like the trunk of a vertebrate..." as my scalpel would clip the lead of a resistor and the radio across the room fall silent, "whose necessary conduction commands the invisible sinews of data, without which thought is impossible. But by the melding of man and machine and applied science... those sinews can be mended!"
And I'd moisten my thumb in my mouth and press it firmly across the severed connection and the radio would burst to life again, a gasp of astonishment would pass through the room. "This then is your legacy, to serve as human bridges to move these bursts of information to the far corners of the planet. Our dominion will be complete."
And my students went on to produce large scale integration with protocol and discrete components all branded into tiny chips manufactured in the Orient that either work mysteriously or fail mysteriously. This wholly Unrepairable deeply integrated all-or-nothing crap.
Because I had failed as a teacher to communicate the value of simplicity.
Now with a wet thumb you can't fix shit.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>