Ethernet Turns 40 159
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."
Re:Token ring ... (Score:4, Insightful)
You might think so, but Token Ring based technolgies are still coming up every now and then, like FCoTR in 2010.
Ethernet is only 33 years old (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
The name Ethernet is 40 years old... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
Re:LANPARTY! (Score:2, Insightful)
LAN parties never made much sense to me.
Were you that overly-excited guy going from door to door in the dorms, announcing, "We're having a LAN party! Unplug your computer and bring it down to the 4th floor lounge!" To which I replied, "why don't I just stay here... I'm already connected."
When I was in college dorms, we had no network connections in dorm rooms. All we had was RJ11 phone service, so the highest speed network connection was a dialup ISP. LAN interfaces weren't even standard equipment on every personal computer yet. If you bought a Mac you got an AAUI port, which required an external transceiver ($100 IIRC) to be useful. If you bought a PC you'd get nothing and would have to add a LAN card, and maybe an AUI transceiver too (depending on whether the card had a built-in transceiver for a particular network media type). In both cases you'd need additional software just to have a networking stack. As for the games, only a pioneering few supported LAN play at all, and in those days, it was far more common for them to use Novell IPX than TCP/IP.
So yeah, we had LAN parties. Sometimes we moved computers around, sometimes we just strung really long 10Base2 coax cables down the hallways, annoying the non-computer-geeks. That was the era in which the "LAN party" was born.
But there's more to it than merely needing to do inconvenient things to play. Face-to-face networked gaming is actually more fun. Believe it or not, it's pretty awesome to be in the same room as everyone you're trying to destroy in a first-person shooter deathmatch, or everyone you're trying to cooperate with to overcome the evil computer AI in a giant WC2 game that lasts three or four hours. And no, headsets aren't quite the same (not that we had them back then anyways).
You kids these days... (shakes cane)
Re:The name Ethernet is 40 years old... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, ethernet remained relevant because it was able to improve, while maintaining backwards compatibility along the way, so your investment was never wasted.
10Base-T cards still had BNC connectors on them, letting you transition smoothly from one to the other.
100Base-Tx was backwards compatible with 10Mbps hubs & NICs.
Gigabit offered backward compatibility with 100Base-Tx.
Switching between fiber and copper is just a matter of swapping the GBIC/SFP transceivers in a switch, with the underlying device having no clue that the media is different.
Newer standards retained backward compatibility with older, less robust cabling... From CAT-3 to CAT-5, to CAT-5e/6, to CAT-6a.
Even though ethernet of today doesn't look like it did, originally. The upgrade path was always simple, smooth, and inexpensive, so it is very much an unbroken chain back to the beginning, and hooking up a modern PC to one of the first ethernet devices is a simple matter of physical-layer conversion.
Unbreakable BNC Connections (Score:5, Insightful)