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Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

amturing.acm.org

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Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#41

Post by jacquesm »

ethbr0 wrote: post #27
jacquesm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it allowed for all kinds of topologies, and that it served as a bus (shared medium, hence the name 'Ether') rather than a point-to-point link is what I think made the biggest difference. Of course now that we all use switched links they are point-to-point again but an ethernet 'hub' gave you the same effect as a bus with all devices seeing all of the traffic. This made efficient broadcast protocols poss…

To build on your comment, although it's been years since I studied Ethernet in depth... - (On the bus thread) Ethernet started from an assumption of bad behavior (out of spec cabling, misbehaving clients, etc.) and tighten requirements just enough to construct a useful network. Much better balance between de facto ruggedness vs performance than its peers. - From the beginning, Ethernet reasoned that it was cheaper to…

I remember paying about $1000 per port for 100 megabit switches.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#43

Post by toyg »

passwordoops wrote: post #40
caseysoftware wrote: post #24

Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"? Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system. When I f…

HN comment of the year winner right here! Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing. If there's one thing I leaned doing a Ph.D. is if you dig deep enough, you find many foundational laws of nature rely on some necessary assumption that, if proven incorrect, would topple the whole thing

CS "laws" like Metcalfe's are closer to Murphy's Law than Newton's...

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#44

Post by Ozzie_osman »

Reading the original ethernet paper was one of my favorite moments in college. Just a brilliantly pragmatic design (especially handling packet collisions with randomized retransmissions).

Made me appreciate how important it is for something to be simple and pragmatic, rather than over-engineered to perfection.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#45

Post by [deleted] »

caseysoftware wrote: post #24

Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"? Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system. When I f…

[deleted]

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#46

Post by WeylandYutani »

nine_k wrote: post #28
Sporktacular wrote: post #22

Ethernet was always inefficient, with a crazy amount of unused legacy space reserved in an unnecessarily large header. CSMA/CD for contention was one of the ugliest medium access solutions imaginable. The coax implementation needing termination plugs was also ugly. Its advantage was cost, having had no license fees, making it suited to consumer/commercial applications driving economies of scale. It's the VHS of datac…

What are some superior competing standards, and could they be implemented in a royalty-free way?

If they went extinct they were not superior.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#47

Post by jacquesm »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #44

Reading the original ethernet paper was one of my favorite moments in college. Just a brilliantly pragmatic design (especially handling packet collisions with randomized retransmissions). Made me appreciate how important it is for something to be simple and pragmatic, rather than over-engineered to perfection.

I think in part what you are witnessing there is the power of a single well informed individual over a committee, which is how the competition was doing it.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#48

Post by shuntress »

passwordoops wrote: post #40
caseysoftware wrote: post #24

Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"? Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system. When I f…

HN comment of the year winner right here! Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing. If there's one thing I leaned doing a Ph.D. is if you dig deep enough, you find many foundational laws of nature rely on some necessary assumption that, if proven incorrect, would topple the whole thing

"IF proven incorrect" is the important part.

This "law" isn't somehow less true just because it was originally used as a sales tactic.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#49

Post by jacquesm »

caseysoftware wrote: post #24

Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"? Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system. When I f…

It is quite telling that when Bob Metcalfe 'makes stuff up' he still hits it out of the park.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#50

Post by fulafel »

lunfard000 wrote: post #16
jacquesm wrote: post #4

Well deserved. I remember dealing with a whole raft of other networking technologies and Ethernet stood head-and-shoulders above anything else available at the time. One thing that is not well appreciated today is how power efficient Ethernet was, even on launch in the coax era. Other network technologies (Token Ring as embodied by IBMs network cards, for instance) consumed power like there was no tomorrow. Leading t…

Sure, years ago. But today Ethernet is just as scammy as everyone else, we've been stuck at 1 Gbps on consumer grade hardware for more than 15 years. There are claims (unverified ofc) about their executives boasting about their stupid margins. 1 Gb switch is like 10-20 euros meanwhile 2.5 Gbps is like over 100...

It's a big loss that wired networking speeds have plateaued but I feel it's more about apps and people adapting to slow and choppy wireless networks that penalise apps leveraging quality connectivity, and stand as bottlenecks in home networks (eg you don't need 10G broadband the wifi will cap everything to slow speeds anyway). And mobile devices that had much smaller screens and memories than computers for a decade+ stalling the demand driven by moore's law.
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