The History of Ethernet

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."

Re:We don't need pipes that big

[Anonymous Coward]

You're failing to see that there are times when that max speed is a byproduct of another useful feature. For instance, my car can top 250km/h and I will never get it anywhere near that speed. But I am capable of accelerating to get out of a tight spot when I am traveling 120. It is possible for me to overtake vehicles on a 2 lane road where my wife's 4 cylinder crossover could not. I am capable of pulling out into traffic and accelerating to flow of traffic on busy roads where my wife's vehicle couldn't. This is all because my car has the torque and gearing that comes with a >250km/h vehicle.

There are many times when mundane tasks such as running office application, browsing the web and watching videos run up against anemic system barriers. A netbook from 3 years ago should be able to do all of these things proficiently, but try copying a large amount of data from one Office program to another while having a few other programs running and you'll quickly hit your page file. How about watching a video while this is happening? Yes, all of these things still work on the anemic system, but sometimes it's worth the extra money to not be bogged down during the outliers.