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Hardware

30 Years of Ethernet 217

Posted by CmdrTaco from the been-a-long-time dept.
Babylon Rocker writes "An interview with one of the inventors of Ethernet." Metcalfe talks about the history of Ethernet as well as what he's been up to for the last couple years. (Not surprisingly, he's now a VC ;)
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30 Years of Ethernet More

30 Years of Ethernet

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  • 30 years of internet... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Znonymous Coward ( 615009 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @07:50PM (#6011967) Journal
    Does anyone have BitTorrent for the past 30 years of the internet? I really need it. Thanks!

  • Yay! (Score:2, Funny)

    by methangel ( 191461 )
    Happy Birthday Ethernet!! Hurray for Ethernet! May it live long and prosper, and my bandwidth never end.

  • Bigmouth (Score:5, Informative)

    by Eric Seppanen ( 79060 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @07:51PM (#6011974)
    Metcalfe has a habit of saying stupid things [infoworld.com], I wonder why people keep listening to him. One great invention thirty years ago, paired with a huge ego, does not an oracle make.

    • Re:Bigmouth (Score:5, Funny)

      by OtisSnerd ( 600854 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @08:06PM (#6012107)
      One great invention thirty years ago, paired with a huge ego, does not an oracle make.

      Tell that to Larry Ellison.

      ---

      This sig intentionally left blank.

    • Well, he has not been proven wrong yet.

      • Well how on earth do you disprove "X will collapse" ? Since if X hasn't collapsed yet, it still might even further in the future..

    • Stupid is as stupid does (Score:2, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      If you're a "free software" true believer, I guess that column must irritate. But I don't see anything stupid about it. Care to get specific?

      • Re:Stupid is as stupid does (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Um. The fact that it was completely wrong.

        Today of course we have the benefit of hindsight, but his predictions made are wrong. Win2k did not kill linux and in fact the linux server market share increased since.

        Duh.
        • Well, if we don't have to give specifics about anything, let me just proclaim that everything I say is totally correct and I never am wrong about anything! I win all arguments, forever!

    • Re:Bigmouth (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rdewald ( 229443 ) * <rdewald&gmail,com> on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @08:30PM (#6012225) Homepage Journal
      You're right, he did say some stupid things and he totally doesn't get Open Source.

      He's brilliant, though. A very bright light. He didn't let the fact that no one could imagine the possibilities of Ethernet limit the scope of it's ultimate possibilities. Indeed, as discussed in this article, datagrams are "regarded" by Ethernet as equals. This is a fundamental principle and it is important.

      Maybe that kind of clarity limits his ability to appreciate the more value-laden social contract of Open Source. That's okay with me. The tent is big enough for Bon Metclfe as far as I am concerned. No matter how utterly I disagree with him on things for which we are all allowed opinions, I'm glad we all agree on how to deliver packets.

      • Re:Bigmouth (Score:4, Insightful)

        by vistic ( 556838 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @12:43AM (#6013238)
        "He's brilliant, though. A very bright light."

        But... the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long!

        How sad... :(
      • You're right, he did say some stupid things and he totally doesn't get Open Source.

        So, Windows 2000 didn't steamroller Linux out of existance. Still, who looks more foolish: Metcalfe for saying that, or the well-known Open Source proponent who predicted that W2K would never ship?

        Metcalfe has a good point: that open source is only essential when manufacturers don't play by the rules. Metcalfe's Law, which predicts that the winners are those who promote interoperability is important in understanding the su

    • Re:Bigmouth (Score:5, Funny)

      by Caligari ( 180276 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @08:37PM (#6012260) Homepage
      Damn straight. Anyone who makes such non-sensical, inflammatory comments as:

      "Stallman and Torvalds would have us return to the time when software was so new that one person working alone could change the world over the weekend. But modern software, [...] is more complicated than that."

      Should be ignored at all cost.

    • Re:Bigmouth (Score:2, Funny)

      by EverDense ( 575518 )
      "they flip the collective finger at Bill Gates, the software Romanoff whom they'd like to trap in a basement somewhere."

      Surely Romanoff was not THAT BAD.
    • No kidding. This [cnn.com] is one of my favorites, in which he predicts the death of flat-rate pricing for Internet access. Which would, of course, mean the end of popular interest in the Internet. "The information's on your web site? That's nice, but I pay by the kilobit. Mail me a copy, please. Thank you."
    • Al Gore says all kinds of stupid things all the time...but he still invented the internet!!!

      (ducks & lowcrawls for cover)

    • Re:Bigmouth (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @02:39AM (#6013511) Journal
      An interesting quote from your linked to story [infoworld.com]:

      Why do I think Linux won't kill Windows? Two reasons. The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. And Linux is 30-year-old technology.

      Name a single networking infrastructure used more commonly than the 30-year-old ethernet!

      Why does this seem ironic to me?
    • in this particular interview, I'd say that the interviewer wasn't particularly clued up.

      bob talks about his "ethernet business model" and goes on to say:

      It's based on de jure standards with proprietary implementations of those de jure standards, and it is unlike open source in that competitors don't give their intellectual property away. The competition is fierce, but there is a market ethic that products will be interoperable. And the standard evolves rapidly based on market engagement in such a way to

  • TCP/IP (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ciroknight ( 601098 )
    Wait... if Ethernet has been around 30 years, that makes TCP/IP PRETTY DAMN OLD!!!!! Anyone up for re-inventing the wheel??? Maybe someone can make a protocol in which practically any piece of information can be traded, with a special way to commit a special pipeline to different medias (such as movie/music downloads getting a compressed, special set of ports used just for that purpose..).
    Next thing you know, the teleco's will be bringing up charges against us for inventing a better internet... when wil

    • Re:TCP/IP (Score:2, Insightful)

      by redcane ( 604255 )
      TCP/IP doesn't have to be as old as ethernet. It's not the only protocol you can run on ethernet. Although I beleive TCP/IP is quite some years old.
      • didn't say it was as old, just that it's older than me ;)
        and yeah, you can use different protocols on the internet.. but who does? yeah UDP has some following, but not NEARLY as much as tcp/ip. fact is just that it's good, I'm just askin if anyone's given any though at the new TCP/IP, a better one, expanded beyond the original's specs, that can do more for us.

        • Re:TCP/IP (Score:3, Interesting)

          by bluGill ( 862 )

          I've seen several different protocols that can be used over IP in actual use. Most were only used for specific applications. Generally bulk mainframe data transfers. TCP and UDP supply just about everything you could want though. The other protocols I mentioned could be implimented over UDP just as easially if anyone cared to. (Not TCP though, slow start and a few other network nice things are specificly not wanted - they assume the network bandwidth is fot one application)

        • Your pairing them off inncorrectly. its not tcp/ip and udp and they are totally unrelated. ip contains both tcp and udp, both are members of the same family, and both are very important. Anything that needs to be done fast, like multiplayer games, uses udp over ip extensively.

          So, you don't have this camp of people who swear by tcp over udp all the time, because anyone who writes stuff to run over ip knows that some stuff demands one or the other, its not a preference issue as you seem to believe.

        • Re:TCP/IP (Score:3, Informative)

          by Muad'Dave ( 255648 )

          Uh, UDP is a member of the TCP/IP suite of protocols (ethernet protocol number 0800). So is ICMP. ARP (number 0806), however, is not. As far as protocols _over ethernet_, see this list of assigned protocol numbers over ethernet [iana.org].

          Protocols within TCP/IP are assigned numbers as well. See this list of IPv4 protocol numbers [iana.org] for more info. TCP packets are tagged as IP protocol 6, UDP are protocol 17, ICMP are protocol 1, etc. They are all ethernet protocol 0800, however.

          Clear as mud?

  • 30 Years of frustration (Score:5, Funny)

    by Malicious ( 567158 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @07:53PM (#6011991)
    Wow, it's been 30 years already, and i *still* haven't managed to get my mitts on a set of RJ45 crimpers...

    • Re:30 Years of frustration (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      RJ45? It's been 30 years and I still haven't managed to get myself the proper wires to set up a vampire tap.
    • It's funny. My nephew wanted to network his house. I've never done anything like that but I knew what was involved. So I naively said, "OK, let's go down to CompUSA, get some Cat5, some rj45 connectors, and a crimper." CompUSA had the cable and the connectors, but no crimpers! We went down the street to a Radio Shack, which had crimpers and cable, but the cable wasn't pre-packaged, and the clerks were clueless as to how to sell it. They had connectors too, but they were absurdly expensive.

      Is there an IQ

      • Is there an IQ ceiling on electronics retailing or what?
        Yes. I've had clerks at Frys walk out of the isle that has what I was looking for and tell me he thought it was across the store.

    • Re:30 Years of frustration (Score:5, Informative)

      by bluGill ( 862 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @08:34PM (#6012247)

      RJ-45 wasn't used for ethernet 30 years ago. Back then it was 10base5 (for 500 meters max cable length), or thicknet. A thick cable (that I have never seen) running thorugh the ceiling, and a AUI cable running from your computer to a tranciever in the cable. AUI is that 15 pin connector (like a pc joystick connector, but a slide holds the cable on not screws or luck) on the back of many older computers. Mostly if you see it there is a 10baseT tranciever connected to it today.

      Sometime latter "thinnet" came out, or 10base2 (200 meter cable), which was a much thinner cable, and much cheaper. It is still cheaper than twisted pair for small instalations. Though almost everyone is using twisted pair because it is easier and more reliable.

      I don't know exactly when 10BaseT with the rj-45 connectors came onto the scene, but it started catching on in the early 90s.

      • Re:30 Years of frustration (Score:5, Informative)

        by b1t r0t ( 216468 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @09:08PM (#6012432)
        You forgot the best part of 10base5... the vampire taps! In order to hook up to thicknet, you have to stick a vampire tap into the coax cable, and that was hooked up through the appropriate interface box to the AUI connector.
        • Wow, people actually remember this stuff...

          Vampire taps were actually a newer development. The original Xerox equipment required you to DRILL into the 10base5 cable. The vampire taps eventually just pierced the "frozen yellow hose" when you clamped them on. That was a huge improvement.

          Thinnet, or "cheapernet", did in fact suck. Although I disagree on the reliability and usefulness of AMP drop taps - those were great for the time, and allowed a network to stay up through disconnects.

          Then 10baseT came out

          • Re:30 Years of frustration (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Muad'Dave ( 255648 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @07:58AM (#6014204) Homepage
            Do you remember:
            • Running that huge 15-conductor AUI cable up into the ceiling and across the room to get to the coaxial cable (up to 50m!)?
            • The 1 meter marks that limited how many taps you could get on the piece of coax that traversed your office?
            • Drilling (yes, drilling!) a friggin' hole in the coax, getting little bits of shield shorting it out, causing the whole segment to die?
            • Those manly N connectors?
            • Swooping on left-over bits of coax to use for you ham station (it was 50 ohm cable, after all!)
            • The relief you felt when 10Base-2 came out (thinnet, using RG-58 and BNC connectors).
            • The uber-relief you felt when 10Base-T came out.

            Those were the days!

      • I remember seeing a room where two THICK cables, thick as your thumbs, came together at a brick sized boxed that proudly proclaimed itself as a bridge. The left was simply labled "South Campus." The right was "North Campus."
        The connector (I forget the name, but think of BNC on steroids) was applied to the cable in two parts the first part pierced the solid sheath so the second part so make contact with the inner core.
        Ahhh
        You know, Nastalgia just isn't what it used to be.

    • Re:30 Years of frustration (Score:4, Funny)

      by Dr Caleb ( 121505 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @09:56PM (#6012620) Homepage Journal
      30 years with an Ethernet and I still haven't caught my Ether Bunny.

      Thit

    • I shouldn't spoil a perfectly good joke, but I just realized that twisted-pair Ethernet, which is what everybody uses today, is only about 12 years old. Thirty years ago, you would have been looking for something to drive a spike into a CATV cable, which is how early Ethernet was implemented.

      Oh hey, found a Commmunications of the ACM article [acm.org] by Metcalf and Boggs about their early work on Ethernet. Good read.

  • Good Wired Article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by R33MSpec ( 631206 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @07:58PM (#6012039) Homepage
    An interesting but old article on wired about Metcalfe here: The Legend of Bob Metcalfe [wired.com]

  • Photons vs Electrons (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @08:26PM (#6012208)
    According to Metcalfe, Ethernet is competing with SONET and Fibre Channel, although he claims that ethernet is winning due to its "internet-compatibility," among other things. To me, this seems like steps in the wrong direction. If fibre optics do not integrate well with the present structure of the internet, then we should be changing the structure, not sticking to the old concept of ethernet. When ethernet was invented, it took advantage of technology available 30 years ago. Since then, we have only been improving on the implementation. Despite the fact that SONET and Fibre Channel are the current "Godzillas," THEY are the ones with the novel technology, and avoiding them would not be in the best interest of advancing technology.

    • Not Photons vs Electrons (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Webmonger ( 24302 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @09:17PM (#6012477) Homepage
      It's not a choice of photons vs electrons. Ethernet can use optical fibre too.

      And I'm glad it's not up to you which technology we use, because the actual tech is only one part of the overall usefulness of a technology. For example, a $100 network card that can do 1gbit/s is more useful to me than a $1000 network card that can do 100 gbit/s. Because I can afford (and justify) the $100 card.

      Price matters. Open standards matter. Would we have Ethereal and tcpdump and all the billions of useful network tools that are out there if we were using proprietary standards for networking? I don't think so. Would people get owned due to network stack (or network protocol design) bugs? Seems quite possible.

      Try looking a little farther out.
    • Uhhh... You can run ethernet over fibre. It works quite well.

      The problem with Fibre Channel is that the storage people are having to recreate all of networking, and make all of the early networking mistakes all over again. Painful. That and it's expensive.

      I can't speak to SONET but if it's the disaster that ATM is/was then there's not a lot to learn there. Maybe some QoS stuff and a lot of bad examples.

      For the record ATM and Fibre Channel both commonly run over copper as well as fibre. The physical
      • Not that I actually know what I'm talking about, but I thought ATM was quite successful in certain niches? IIRC my DSL connection is basically ATM mingled with an analog signal... (Now ATM as an end-user networking architecture -- that has been a resounding failure. But I was under the impression that The Phone Company (TM) uses it quite a bit.)
    • I've never done any fibre channel, but SONET is very not novel, and in fact it is a dying dinosaur. The only reason it is so widespread is tradition, and the ethernet has caught up bigtime; and is much, much cheaper.

      If I was a telephone company I would be looking at buying only VOIP equipment and run it on private LANs with plenty of bandwidth. No SONET at all.

    • OK first off Ethernet works great over fiber actualy in the last two revision fiber was first (1 gig and 10gigE I'm not sure on 100mb) Fiber Channel does nothing new realy it's just another packtied network that happen to run are some pretty high speeds and support packetized SCSI and network (mostly IP) it's nice it has dynamic addressing and a lot of support for bonding channels together. Sonet realy is what you want to use for going the distance it supports very large packets something ethernet has big

  • Huh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @08:33PM (#6012244)
    What, no gratuitous Al Gore comments? ;)

  • Xerox, Broadband (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @08:40PM (#6012280) Homepage Journal
    Two interesting bits of trivia. First, note that Xerox, which did all the early R&D for Ethernet, is mentioned only in passing. As with the GUI revolution and OOP, Xerox did all the pioneering, but dropped the ball when it came to actually profitting from it.

    Second, Metcalfe defines "broadband" to mean "high bitrate" rather than "uses a broad frequency band". Nitpickers like me have been quibbling over this change in definitions, but if someone like Metcalfe has gone over, it's time to let it drop!

  • But...but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by A_Non_Moose ( 413034 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @08:41PM (#6012289) Homepage Journal
    "The technology is 30 years old...who'd want to use it?"

    Wasn't that one of Microsoft's arguments against Linux at one time?

    And, I *KNEW* I was a geek when this kept me laughing for 30+ minutes...laughing so hard I had tears rolling down my eyes and my sides hurt:

    Ethernet: A device used to catch the Ether-bunny.

    {snerk...hahahahaha}

  • Seems appropriate... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Mondoz ( 672060 )
    Okay, not originally said about ethernet... "How can one little insulated wire bring so much happiness??"

  • Open sores (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mark ( 495 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @08:45PM (#6012315)
    Isn't this the guy that coined the term "open sores" - and went on to predict that the internet would collapse under the weight of it's own traffic within some short time frame, many years ago.

    I seem to remember that he said he would "eat his words" if he was wrong, and was subsequently fed them.

    • Metcalfe Eats His Own Words (Score:5, Funny)

      by handy_vandal ( 606174 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @11:24PM (#6012959) Homepage Journal
      [Metcalfe] makes predictions - like his famous pronouncement that the Internet would "go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." When that prediction failed to come true, Metcalfe engaged in some highly theatrical public penance: In front of an audience, he put that particular column into a blender, poured in some water, and proceeded to eat the resulting frappe with a spoon.

      Source [wired.com]

  • Stupid ethernet.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by the uNF cola ( 657200 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @09:12PM (#6012448)
    Stupid coax cables and terminators. Ever shock yourself on one of those things? Not good.

    • Hey! Parent is NOT off-topic!

      Original blue book ethernet on coax was DC coupled - many problems with building grounds, electrical wiring. Changed to AC coupled around 1982 (?) then we could ground the coax shield at one place and not kill as many network installers. Good thing (mostly).


      • No kidding! I remember coming to work and finding the thick ethernet cable _hot_!!! Apparently a neutral link in a panel box broke, and the ethernet cable was supplying neutral to my end of the building. Thank goodness for ac-coupling.

        • Thicknet with vampire taps, ugh. I measured >60V between "ground" connections on two AC outlets in the same room, once. Imagine what that was doing to the poor network cards. A company in Minnesota once paid me to fly up there and diagnose their hardware problem. Solution was to plug their scanner and computer into a single outlet strip with common ground. Fortunately, most single-ended interfaces are gone. Mostly what I do that leaves a rack goes on fiber, now.

  • Freenet Key (Score:5, Informative)

    by FreeSpeechBot ( 674842 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @09:13PM (#6012455)
    For Those with Freenet [127.0.0.1]
    FOr those without [68.38.52.138]

  • The "gigalapse" that wasn't (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @10:20PM (#6012721)
    Bob Metcalfe once predicted that the internet would 'gigalapse' due to IP namespace exhaustion and sheer load. It didn't happen.

    Bob has made a career out of making an ass of himself with idiotic predictions coupled with a humongous ego. He fancied himself quite clever when he called the free software/open source movement "the open sores movement." Har har! You may have a career with ZDNET yet, Bob.

    Hey Bob we thank you for ethernet, but you're still a jerk.

  • My favorite thing about Ethernet (Score:5, Funny)

    by sbwoodside ( 134679 ) <sbwoodside@yahoo.com> on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @10:50PM (#6012833) Homepage
    is CSMA/CD . What a brilliant MAC. You just start shouting, check to see if anyone else was shouting, and if they were, wait a random amount of time and start shouting again. It's so simple and stupid that no one would ever think it works.

    simon

  • He still doesn't "get" open source. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nathanh ( 1214 ) on Wednesday May 21, 2003 @11:17PM (#6012930) Homepage

    He makes this rather ignorant comment:

    ... it is unlike open source in that competitors don't give their intellectual property away.

    Open source contributors who use the GPL never "give their intellectual property away". Copyrights are very strongly defended; the recent FSF vs OpenTV story is sufficient proof of this. Trademarks are very strongly defended: Linus and RedHat have both defended trademarks. Patents are a sticky mess but even then the GPL doesn't demand that you give up patents; only that you don't use them to restrict or impede licensing. The open source movement is not so stupid as to "give away" code. Strong ownership of intellectual property is at the very core of open source.

    The subtle but important distinction is that open source developers want to share their intellectual property. The philosophy is "you may use my IP if I can use yours". This is not giving anything away; it's building a community of cooperation. There is an exchange of value between two parties even though the exchange is not monetary.

    I suppose it's possible to argue that BSD zealots are giving their intellectual property away. Yet another reason to avoid the BSD license.

  • ...since I had to fsck with terminating resistors (10base2), vampire taps (10base5) or that crappy stiff ArcNet cable. I still have working setups of each packed away in my basement.

  • Don't Forget David Boggs (Score:4, Informative)

    by n9fzx ( 128488 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @02:04AM (#6013422) Homepage Journal
    David was the other half of the Metcalfe-Boggs "team" that made Ethernet a reality. Dave is an honest-to-nuts Friend of the Electron electrical engineer, who had to crack the problem of making CSMA/CD work in the Real World; in particular, how do your hear a transmitter 500 meters away when you're sitting right next to your own?

    Boggs invented the first (of many) hardware circuit techniques to do collision detection, and other elements of transceiver design. If Dave hadn't picked up a soldering iron, we'd probably be doing DATAKIT or some other telco hack.

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