
Ethernet at 40: Bob Metcalfe reveals its turbulent youth - iProject
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/09/metcalfe_on_ethernet/
======
cpr
Boy, I remember the days of thick coax, pre-commercial Ethernet and Ethernet
workalikes.

For the MIT AI Lab, LCS and EECS departments, we strung the fat coax all the
over the campus for CHAOSnet (home-grown MIT equivalent used to connect the
Lisp Machines and DEC-10/-20 machines with vampire taps), and any kink/dent
would cause massive signal loss. So we'd get out our trusty TDR (time-domain
reflectometer) and find where the kink was on the cable from the test point,
then climb through ceilings and crawl spaces to cut and splice it out, or just
replace whole cable segments.

Fun times!

~~~
phpnode
did coax ethernet _ever_ work reliably? I remember spending entire days
fiddling with cables and terminators trying to get multiplayer quake to work
over a network, we almost always had to resort to (very slow) serial ports
instead.

~~~
hga
Yeah, coax Ethernet did work reliability, or at least enough to get the job
done, but none of us missed it when twisted pair became available, it was a
major pain when a physical disruption would take out a whole cable segment.
Note the original coax for commercial Ethernet was quite a bit narrower and
more flexible than that used for the CHAOSnet. From very old memory, something
close to maybe 3/4ths? vs. 0.375 of an inch for what came to be named 10BASE5:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5> Original research Ethernet also used
narrower coax.

Here's Wikipedia on CHAOSnet: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaosnet> ; it
seems to be pretty accurate.

------
EEGuy
Succinctly, I like to think of Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs as "The guys who
figured out how wire works".

In more detail: <http://ethernethistory.typepad.com/papers/EthernetPaper.pdf>

------
jseliger
_"Ethernet was developed in the context of the internet with its seven levels
of the ISO reference model," he said. "So we had a job to do at level one and
two, and we didn't burden Ethernet with all the other stuff that we knew would
be above us. We didn't do security, we didn't do encryption, we didn't even do
acknowledgements."_

Very interesting story—I wish it had been more detailed in places, but I love
this middle section, about how simplicity sometimes beats complexity.

It's also amazing how prevalent Ethernet still is, even when wireless is a
competitor. The other day I left this comment:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052448> on HN, because in some
circumstances running a cheap ethernet cable from a router to a desk, couch,
or other work station can still be a real win, especially given how
inexpensive even very long ethernet cables are from Monoprice.com.

They last forever, aren't subject to the level of interference wireless is,
and, in many conditions, have faster data transfer speeds. Ethernet is still
great.

~~~
Freaky
Unfortunately these days it's either painfully slow or painfully expensive.
Individual disks have been able to outpace GigE for years, even ignoring SSDs
and modest RAID configurations, and 10GigE isn't exactly sprinting full pelt
into the general market, with cards starting at around £300 and the less said
about the switches the better.

It's very lame how I can pump out >400MB/s locally on a cheap NAS with some
old spare HDs, but can never get more than about 80MB/s out of it over SMB.
Thanks for helping make my backups take about 4x longer than they should,
Ethernet.

I'm half tempted to give a second hand InfiniBand setup a try, seeing as
10Gbit cards can be had from about £15.

