[HN Gopher] Ethernet's Emergence from Xerox PARC
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Ethernet's Emergence from Xerox PARC
Author : rcarmo
Score : 69 points
Date : 2022-03-23 09:59 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (r6.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (r6.ieee.org)
| Angostura wrote:
| Token Ring's where it's at - you mark my words.
| aksss wrote:
| Tolkien's ring has a better story.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Pfft. It's ATM, everywhere, for all the things.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I recommend The Triumph of Ethernet: Technological Communities
| and the Battle for the LAN Standard by Urs von Burg for a great
| history of Ethernet.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| when Silicon Valley still had a stomach for true innovation!!
| It's sad how the pinnacle of innovation today is one big company
| copying some stupid thing from another big or small company, like
| the stupid so-called shorts of youtube!!!
| kkfx wrote:
| When means when big companies _free_ labs exists, ruled by
| technicians not managers, without time-to-market pressure, with
| public funds.
|
| https://blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-researc...
| https://archive.vn/CKdqr
|
| That's the "when"... To reproduce it we need similar
| conditions, the opposite of actual neoliberal agenda...
| pinewurst wrote:
| Thank the triumph of 'shareholder dominance' and such
| creatures as Jack Welch for starving blue-sky R&D to death.
| ksec wrote:
| >This presentation will trace the history and development of
| Ethernet as a 10 Mb/s
|
| And we will [1] have 800G and 1.6T Ethernet [2] around 2025 -
| 2030. That is 200 _GB_ /s.
|
| [1] https://ethernetalliance.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/03/Ethe...
|
| [2] The Case for 1.6 Terabit Ethernet
|
| https://www.ieee802.org/3/B400G/public/21_05/dambrosia_b400g...
| omarhaneef wrote:
| I remember a Jobs interview when he says he visited PARC and they
| showed him 3 things:
|
| Windows environment (windows, icons, mouse, pull down menu and
| please appreciate that, back then, all of them were innovations)
|
| Object oriented programming
|
| Connectivity (he didn't call it Ethernet in his interview. He
| might have called it the internet)
|
| Amazing!
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| https://youtu.be/J33pVRdxWbw?t=396
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| I worked for Xerox in 1979-1980. The general Xerox organization
| was too copier-focused to appreciate the treasure they had at
| PARC. It's ironic that every new hire was given a copy of "The
| Billions Nobody Wanted" (by John H. Dessauer), a bio of Chester
| Carlson, the inventor of xerography.
| matt_s wrote:
| One perspective Alan Kay had was that no company could really
| capitalize on so many different things that came out of PARC.
| Xerox picked laser printing and capitalized it to the point of
| being forced by the government to release patents.
|
| How to Invent the Future (2 parts), Alan Kay talking at
| Stanford - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ
| vaxman wrote:
| I did some contract work for them in 80s and asked why they
| were letting Microsoft and Apple blow up the universe..the
| response (from senior, or should I say Sr. ) management was
| that they were waiting to see which one won and would then "sue
| the winner". Somehow they wound up suing Apple and famously
| lost on statutory grounds. (For the under-40 crowd: Before
| Apple ripped off Xerox and Microsoft ripped off Apple for the
| Graphical User Interface, they both were ripping off CP/M that,
| in turn, was a ripoff of RSX-11, which followed norms
| established by IBM, some 30 years earlier! The passage of time
| has shown those companies couldn't research their way out of a
| plastic bag --2022 and we get the same UX with all kinds of
| smoke and mirrors to explain how cool Taiwan's new 5nm
| fabrication is.)
| panick21_ wrote:
| What is even funnier is that half of the major companies
| founded right after that all basically went to PARC and said
| 'Great Idea were gone do that'.
|
| Sun, Apple, Microsoft and many others were inspired by it.
| Jemm wrote:
| I read that book. It opens with statistics on the number of
| photocopies made each year in the USA.
|
| Interesting now that Xerox seems to be dropping the ball on
| making decent reliable copiers.
| haylem wrote:
| If you like that sort of look back at tech history, and at things
| that came out from the PARC, I highly recommend "Dealers of
| Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by
| Michael Hiltzik. It's a very well-written book with a ton of
| insights about how a lot of the things we took for granted came
| to be, from our printers and scanners, tablets, programming
| languages, and more.
|
| If my memory serves right, it details a bunch of things on the
| development of laser printers, which gave Xerox a huge edge, the
| creation of the PARC and the giants that joined it, and many of
| the things they worked on: the Alto, Smalltalk, the Dynabook,
| and, indeed, the Ethernet.
|
| It's also pretty funny to read how some administrative red-tape
| was sometimes being circumvented.
|
| And also a bit sad to read how things went a bit south.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| Second this, great book.
| vaxman wrote:
| Ethernet was XNS/ITP when it first started. That protocol
| splintered into DECnet, AppleTalk, Novell and TCP/IP. The advent
| of async-TCP/IP on commodity hardware (aka Microsoft RAS) caused
| it to takeover the game and created the dystopia we have now
| (with nightly national news warning our parents and grandparents
| that Russia is readying a "cyberattack" that will shutdown the
| power running their oxygen machines and hearing aide chargers).
| TCP/IP could transcend LANs and WANs without special NNBs (now
| called routers) for the first time. (Prior to that, WAN
| communications were distance-priced, making it cost prohibitive
| for spammers or disenfranchised kids in USSR ghettos to cause
| your local hospital to become locked out during surgeries --your
| local hospital built from the success of the Allied Forces,
| likely including your parents and grand parents.)
|
| Disclaimer: VMS device drivers for third-party Unibus Ethernet
| adapter board bc DEC wasn't shipping them yet (due to the
| albatrosses of PCL, DECnet and later OSI). I later went to DEC
| and SynOptics, but didn't even know Thompson was at SynOptics.
| (They had hired a genius European foreign national as software
| manager from a company down the street bc he wanted to remain in
| US and he, in turn, hired a 70s-series Indian to mentor off me,
| but instead he violated accepted business ethics, used our
| practices against us and caused millions of dollars worth of
| damage to SynOptics and Me personally...they tried to fire him
| but HR kicked it back and in fury, they transferred him to HR and
| ordered him not to touch any computers until he quit and went to
| work across the street for a competitor (ultimate betrayal by
| Valley rules) and eventually wound up a VP --of HR-- for the
| famous Pagoda owner! Glad I can laugh about it all now. I sat
| next to John Chaimberlain many years later when a Chinese
| presenter said SynOpsis in a thick tone that sounded like
| SynOptics and John raised his hand and asked why we were bringing
| up that mess again. LoL Just ramblings of now irrelevant things
| that went on in the exciting years before the dot-com bubble
| changed the players.
| throw0101a wrote:
| If anyone wants to get into the low-level details of Ethernet,
| O'Reilly has a good book (a bit old now, so may not have the
| _latest_ releases):
|
| * https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-the-definitive...
|
| A lot of interesting stuff going on with _single_ -pair (two
| wires):
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#Sin...
| Jemm wrote:
| Fun thing about early ethernet cards, they had a bad habit of
| catching on fire. Had it happen a few times.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| How does that happen? Bad capacitors?
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