[HN Gopher] David Boggs has died
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David Boggs has died
Author : rbanffy
Score : 284 points
Date : 2022-03-01 11:55 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| egberts1 wrote:
| First commercial Ethernet media (1980) also was a RG-8X coaxial
| cable using the circa-1940 RF connector called "N" (as opposed to
| the F or the unthreaded RCA phono connector).
|
| You could then do "simple" vampire tap into such Ethernet RF
| cable to expand your network.
|
| Because the then-10Base-5 signal is a guided RF-based wire, it
| was originally made to allow communication in one-direction only
| ... at a time (half-duplex). Each end of the wire had to wait
| their turn (just like telegraph operators did by beaconing their
| intent to send info by pre-sending some well-known code).
|
| Both IBM and Xerox Parc diverged into Token Bus and Star network
| configuration to deal with this "half-duplex" issues using the
| same collision backoff algorithm.
|
| I think David unknowingly cemented the IEEE 802.3 standard as a
| winner when he prototyped the N-backoff algorithm for upcoming
| 802.3 for the 802 IEEE Working Group.
|
| This half-duplex constraint of 802.3 (and 10Base-5) technology
| was losing out to the IBM token bus (IEEE 802.5) methodology in
| maximum bandwidth utilization.
|
| Of course, without this N-Backoff algorithm, 802.3 wouldn't have
| made the next step of leveraging a twisted pair (precursor to
| 802.3 10Base-T) possible to achieve this full-duplex and modern
| Ethernet we know to this day. Token bus and token ring both had
| effectively lost out in the Ethernet "Duplex War".
|
| While Bob Metcalf may have made it possible the 10Base-5
| communications, he also got a lot of hardware help so David Bogg
| actually did the thinking of backoff algorithm ... at hardware
| level. And the PARC performance team refined the backoff
| algorithm to near perfection.
|
| Any error are mine and mine alone. I was close enough to that
| circle, others may be closer.
| haeberli wrote:
| I was lucky enough to know him. Brilliant, hard-working, soft-
| spoken.
| orionblastar wrote:
| Rip my condolences for the Boggs family.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/fVTEu
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220301034140/https://www.nytime...
| deeblering4 wrote:
| > Ethernet, the computer networking technology that connects PCs
| to printers, other devices and the internet in offices and homes
|
| That has to be one of the worst description of ethernet that I've
| seen!
| gowld wrote:
| What's a better one?
| can16358p wrote:
| Decades later, and many, many of both residental, office and
| infrastructural networks still use Ethernet and it's not going
| anywhere away soon.
|
| Respect. Rest in peace.
| abraae wrote:
| I remember working at IBM, token ring was the protocol du jure.
|
| Someone told me about this crazy non-IBM protocol where you
| just shoved data into the wires. If it collided with someone
| else's data - just try again!
|
| Thanks to a good helping of fud, there was no doubt in my mind
| that this was a rubbish approach that wouldn't scale (though
| obviously it was pretty handy not having to wire your network
| into a ring configuration).
| sshagent wrote:
| wow, I've not heard 'token ring' mentioned for a long long
| while.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| In retrospect, what were Token Ring's downsides that caused
| it to lose?
|
| Requiring shielded twisted pair cabling? Processor costs
| (when it mattered) and Ethernet's benefiting massively from
| cheap switches (when hardware costs had dropped)?
| abraae wrote:
| I understand it was all about cost and complexity, token
| ring was superior technically, but as ethernet prices
| dropped steadily over the years, and its cheaper
| collision detection approach turned out to usually be
| "good enough" (especially with the advent of smart
| switches that made collisions less of an issue), the
| balance switched in ethernet's favour.
|
| Token ring cost 5-6 times as much, and required a special
| MAU device (the thing that sat on the ring). Then the
| actual networked computers had a point to point
| connection to the MAU. Special cabling, not just twisted
| pair. IBM charged a lot for anyone else to licence the
| tech.
|
| Token ring was clever and worked well though - a heavily
| used 10Mbps token ring network was far faster than the
| equivalent ethernet network due to no collisions.
| m463 wrote:
| > _Decades later, and many, many of both residental, office and
| infrastructural networks still use Ethernet and it 's not going
| anywhere away soon._
|
| It's true but kind of funny since ethernet has changed 180
| degrees from the original design. I remember tapping thick
| cables with vampire taps when it was a shared medium with
| collision detect and now cables are plug and play with a star
| topology.
| can16358p wrote:
| Sure. Well some changes are likely to happen in 50 years,
| especially "cosmetic" ones. But just like USB which now has
| many form factors, or HTTP with all these added/changed
| headers, the standard still lives as the king, which is a
| visionary achievement by itself IMO.
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| It constantly amazes me how great ideas and inventions stem from
| the humblest beginnings.
|
| 1) Sees someone struggling over some problem and asks if he can
| help.
|
| 2) Together, they get it working and it goes on to be used
| globally
|
| 3) ...
|
| 4) "And the Nobel Prize for xxx goes to ..."
| as-j wrote:
| Oh no! This breaks my heart. :(
|
| David and Ron Crane hired me for my first job in California right
| around 2000. I had no clue who they both were we just met at a
| trade show and I said I was looking for a job, we had this crazy
| interview where we just talked about anything and everything, and
| voila I was working in silicon valley. I think we spent about 2
| hours talking about how we could float a balloon beside an AM
| radio station and how light up a light bulb...
|
| Anyways, who fresh out of school doesn't work for the inventor of
| ethernet/fast ethernet/a core founder of 3com, etc? I only spent
| 2 years working with them, and I've always been looking to work
| with similar talent/kindness/etc. How they put up with a fresh
| grad I will never know.
|
| I remember David and I working on an SDSL project, and we were
| just having the worst time ever. We couldn't get it train and
| finish setting up the link, it did almost everything but then
| just failed at the end. It was meant to be easy....but we just
| couldn't figure it out. We spent a crazy amount of time on it,
| maybe a month. Finally Ron got fed up, and asked "have you tried
| reversing the pairs?" and it worked! Turns out we had plugged the
| cable in backwards, and trying to streamline/debug the code had
| removed the final bits of cleanup code that checked if the pair
| was reversed. Ah well.
|
| They were amazing mentors and friends. David invited me over to
| his home for wine tastings, to meet his cats (Palo and Alto),
| etc. I unfortunately lost touch with him over the years as I
| moved, he moved, etc.
|
| Thank you David, you welcomed me to California and you'll be
| missed.
| rendall wrote:
| My condolences.
| atdrummond wrote:
| Sorry for your loss.
|
| I ran into him once at the Computer History Museum in Mountain
| View a while back and he was willing to grab lunch with me and
| some friends and shoot the shit for a few hours. I can tell why
| he was a great mentor - approachable and knowledgeable.
| stringfood wrote:
| Finally some relevancy I can bring to Hacker News. Ron Crane
| was my uncle and him and David Boggs were such good friends
| till the end. Any more good stories from Ron or Dave? They are
| hard to come by.
|
| 2000 would've been around the time of LAN media, no?
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| I ran across him years ago at a shooting event (he had a very
| cool Steyr AUG). He was humble, down to Earth, and just a really
| neat guy. Amazing to think how his work impacted us all.
|
| His one conceit to vanity? The personalized plate on his older
| Mercedes SL coupe was something like ETHERNT, which is why I
| initially approached him.
| seibelj wrote:
| License plates are a great conversation starter. Mine maps
| easily to "bitcoins" and I have had a lot of impromptu
| conversations (and probably generated a lot of anger from
| crypto haters driving behind me!).
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Just the yesterday I saw a car with the plates "TSR73" drive
| by; I'm still curious who that was as, AFAIK all of the
| founders of TSR are dead. I suppose it's possible it was
| someone with those initials that was born or graduated in
| 1973, but weird coincidence.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| I had one of those yellow on black CA plates that said
| "INITSIX" -- only one person ever mentioned it but I enjoyed
| having it.
| steviedotboston wrote:
| I heard he drank 70 beers on a flight once. RIP chickeman.
| albeebe1 wrote:
| you're thinking Wade Boggs
| standardly wrote:
| RIP Wade Boggs
| bena wrote:
| Again, Wade Boggs is very much alive.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| The beer drinking story as told by Charlie Day (Almost
| Sunny in Philadelphia):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3lpKvr1GCs
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Was feeling sombre about this thread but this randomness made
| me laugh
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> "He was the perfect partner for me," Mr. Metcalfe said in an
| interview. "I was more of a concept artist, and he was a build-
| the-hardware-in-the-back-room engineer."_
|
| This is a _very_ common pattern in these types of things.
|
| Usually, the "concept artist" gets all the credit, but the one in
| the back room was every bit as essential as the "idea person."
|
| In my experience, "idea people" seldom understand how
| _incredibly_ valuable good "back room implementation" people
| are.
|
| I'm biased, though, as that's my forte, and I have had to fend
| off a _lot_ of highly insulting "idea people," over the years.
|
| _> His response was unequivocal. "Seems Ethernet does not work
| in theory," he said, "only in practice."_
|
| Ooohhh... _burn_
| gowld wrote:
| Which _successful_ "idea people" don't value their "backroom
| implementation" people?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _Successful_ ones?
|
| None, that I know of.
|
| _Un_ successful ones, though...pretty much every single one
| that I've ever met.
|
| Story time:
|
| I have a couple of friends that are _quite_ rich. They run an
| apparel company, but a "white-label" one. You've probably
| worn clothes by them, but never knew it.
|
| The "creativity" behind the company, is the wife. She's
| pretty awesome. But her husband is a _very_ sharp
| businessman. Really humble, and low-key, but woe be unto
| anyone that tries to pull a fast one on him.
|
| Without her, he would be nothing, but without _him_ , she
| would probably still be in a small, windowless, room, in some
| Manhattan building, helping someone else get rich.
| spogbiper wrote:
| Maybe Steve Jobs? just going by the anecdotes I've heard over
| the years
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| From what I understand, Jobs was actually really good at
| picking good implementation people.
|
| He treated people like crap. Not sure if that extended to
| his implementation people. I'm pretty sure he gave them a
| lot of agency and money, though.
|
| I don't really recall him surrendering the spotlight to his
| backroom people. Cook seems to be much better at that.
| fsckboy wrote:
| not tryna be a grammar nazi (think of me more like a
| schoolteacher within a fascist regime) but _forte_ , pronounced
| "fort", is a French word for strong and that's the word we use
| in English.
|
| Pronouncing it _forte_ is actually a confusion with the Italian
| word _forte_ which comes from music and means loud.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Fair 'nuff. I appreciate the correction, and will use it
| correctly, henceforth.
|
| Thanks!
|
| You may like this: http://queenofwands.net/d/20031003.html
| throwanem wrote:
| Not so fast. /'fo:teI/ is a perfectly permissible English
| pronunciation for "forte", and it's also the one most if
| not all fluent speakers expect that word to take -
| especially since /'fo:t/ is how we pronounce "fort" meaning
| "fortification". The next substantiated claim I see that
| these words should be homonymous will be the first, and
| even a substantiated such claim remains incorrect in the
| face of the way people actually use and understand
| language.
|
| The only thing I see here to quibble with would be the
| acute accent on the final "e", which is rarely if ever a
| feature of modern English orthography in any case. Beyond
| that, I think GP's prescriptivism has, like that of the
| Academie Francaise, proceeded to a fault - specifically in
| GP's case, the fault of recommending you mispronounce
| "forte".
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I took it as "lose the accent, but pronounce it 'fort-
| TAY'."
| mattmajewski wrote:
| A living legend. Ethernet was groundbreaking...I have memories of
| helping my dad wire our house, we bought like 400ft of cable, a
| wire stripper, and a ton of RJ45 plugs and customized them to the
| perfect length. Hardwired high speed gaming, video production, on
| stage audio monitors, so many things benefited and are still used
| today. RIP.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > "Seems Ethernet does not work in theory," he said, "only in
| practice."
|
| Respect!
| mshockwave wrote:
| slightly tangent: is it true that ethernet doesn't have a solid
| math theory behind? if so, how does it scale?
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I'm old enough to have been a sysadmin before ethernet
| switches were available. We used (literal) hubs, where every
| packet goes to every machine.
|
| And it really did not scale. If you got too many computers on
| one Ethernet network together, things would start to really
| bog down.
|
| We would address this by splitting an ethernet network into
| two. When it got too slow, we'd take our network of (say)
| 1.2.3.0 - 1.2.3.255 and split it into two networks, 1.2.3.0 -
| 1.2.3.127 and 1.2.3.128 - 1.2.3.255. Each of these ethernet
| networks would get its own separate port in the IP router.
| (Which could require adding cards to the router. And put
| extra processing load on it.)
|
| DHCP did not exist yet, so we had to manually go to each
| computer and change its broadcast address, subnet mask, and
| default route.
|
| This was disruptive, so we tried to keep all addresses in the
| lower portion of the address range so that they would
| continue to function well enough during such a transition.
| For example, a host at 1.2.3.10 with subnet mask
| 255.255.255.0, router address 1.2.3.1, and broadcast address
| 1.2.3.255 would still function when we changed its ethernet
| to be 1.2.3.0 - 1.2.3.127 instead of 1.2.3.0 - 1.2.3.255. Its
| broadcast address and netmask were wrong, but it wasn't
| completely offline. (By contrast, a host with address
| 1.2.3.200 would be out of range for the new network
| parameters and would have problems immediately.)
|
| Then Grand Junction came up with the idea of ethernet
| switches to isolate traffic, and we didn't get one because
| they were a bajillion dollars. I don't know the exact prices,
| but I would guesstimate something like $5000 to $10000 for a
| switch with around 10 ports.
|
| But eventually they came down in price. With an ethernet
| switch, everything was amazingly easy in comparison. It
| basically did the same thing I'm talking about (splitting an
| ethernet into pieces so the devices don't try to talk over
| each other), except instead of it being a weeks-long manual
| process, it happened automatically in real time.
|
| Once switches became standard, ethernet was pretty scalable.
| Broadcast traffic still isn't scalable if it's used too much,
| but otherwise it basically works fine.
| gjf wrote:
| Short answer is: it doesn't. When designing networks you will
| try to reduce the scope of layer 2 broadcast domains.
| justin66 wrote:
| Of course it's not true.
| markjenkinswpg wrote:
| Switching.
| gowld wrote:
| Why would math theory be required for scaling?
| fragmede wrote:
| Implementation details at layer 1 and 2 of the OSI model.
| If machine aa needs to talk to machine zz (and there are
| all the machine in between them), then aa needs a timeslice
| to change the electrical levels that are on the actual
| ethernet cable, as does zz in order to reply, but if ab and
| ac and ad and all the way to zy are also busy
| communicating, then when does zz _get_ that timeslice?
| Switching (vs hubs) improves the situation drastically, but
| as you scale up (like, thousands of thousands aka
| "webscale", there's clearly going to be some sort of limit
| at some point (until you apply other technology). What is
| that point using Ethernet though, and how do you calculate
| that?
| mbostleman wrote:
| "[using Ethernet] people can send email over an office network or
| visit a website through a coffee shop hot spot."
|
| Seems a bit understated.
| drallison wrote:
| It is sad to learn that David Boggs has passed. Sadder still,
| ethernet dominates his acknowledged legacy. Pupnet at Xerox PARC
| was the test bed for modern networked computing. John Shoch and
| Jon Hupp, He did the measurements that made improving ethernet
| possible.And his code made worms possible; see The "Worm"
| Programs Early Experience with a Distributed Computation, which
| appeared in CACM 25:3 (March 1982).
| xbar wrote:
| RIP, David Boggs.
|
| I did not know him personally, but I was always grateful for his
| humility and grace while wearing the mantle great innovation.
| nealabq wrote:
| A low-profile guy whose work benefits us all.
|
| https://www.engadget.com/ethernet-co-inventor-david-boggs-di...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boggs
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(page generated 2022-03-01 23:00 UTC)