The History of Ethernet 322
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the facilitating-the-internets dept.
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."
Yet my i7... (Score:4, Funny)
...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."
Re:We don't need pipes that big (Score:5, Funny)
Yea, I agree totally, we don't need fast processing or networking.... except for those times where we do. That's why I bought a car with a top speed of 30 miles per hour. I mean, I don't need a car that can go faster, except for when I'm driving on a road with a higher speed limit. In fact, I buy everything with a maximum capacity of my average use, rather than my peak use. That's why my house has zero bedrooms and zero bathrooms. I worked out the math, and I don't use either one of those stupid things anywhere near 50% of the time.
Re:Frequencies and illness. (Score:4, Funny)
The only enhancement I can come up with would be to branch out into homepathy. That really gets the nerds in a lather.