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Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

amturing.acm.org

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Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#61

Post by gooroo »

themoonisachees wrote: post #20
jacquesm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't make heads or tails of your comment. What is scammy about Ethernet and what 'stupid margins' does Ethernet have? It's a networking standard, not a company.

2.5G or even 10G is not that much more expensive and companies making consumer electronics sell it as a considerable premium for what is essentially the same cost difference as making a 8gb vs 16 gb flash drive. Of course, regular internet users don't need more than 2.5G (and couldn't use it in most of the world due to ISP monopolies) so anything faster than gigabit is a target for segmentation.

The market at work. There is just no real demand for anything beyond 1G.

The HN crowd is not representative of what would be needed to drive the price tags down on 2.5G stuff.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#62

Post by oldgradstudent »

shuntress wrote: post #48
passwordoops wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would you even test such a vague law, let alone disproving it?

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#63

Post by gooroo »

drewg123 wrote: post #58

Back when I was doing a lot of ethernet driver work, I joked to colleagues about what I'd do if I had a time machine. Go back and kill Hitler? no. Go back and stop John Wilkes Booth from shooting Lincoln? No. I'd go back and convince Bob Metcalfe to make ethernet headers 16 bytes rather than 14 to avoid all sorts of annoying alignment issues

Yeah those alignment issues surely have killed more jews than that Hitler guy. /s

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#64

Post by ethbr0 »

jacquesm wrote: post #41
ethbr0 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ha! But they delivered that much value (or more), so the market supported the price until supply flooded.

We could do worse for a transformative technology ranking metric than "How overpriced was this when first released?" (significant look at Nvidia cards)

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#66

Post by drewg123 »

jacquesm wrote: post #41
ethbr0 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ethernet switches are actually pretty complex things, when you think about it. They have to learn what MAC addresses are behind each port, and build a complex forwarding table and do table lookups in real time. The larger the switch, the more complex it is. Its hard to make it scale.

Around the same era, Myrinet switches with higher bandwidth (1.2Gb/s if I remember correctly) and higher density at a fraction of the port cost of slower ethernet switches. This was possible because the Myrinet switches were dumb.. The Myrinet network elected a "mapper" that distributed routes to all NICs. The NICs then pre-pended routing flits to the front of each packet. So to forward a packet to its destination, all a Myrinet switch had to do was strip off and then read the first flit, see that it said "exit this hop on port 7", and then forward it on to the next switch. Higher densities were achieved with multiple chips inside the cabinet.

In the mid 2000s we even built one of what was, at the time, one of the worlds largest ethernet switches using (newer, faster Myrinet) internally, and encapsulating the ethernet traffic inside Myrinet. That product died due to pressure from folks that were our partners, but felt threatened by our incredibly inexpensive high density switches.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2323306/myricom-rolls-o...

EDIT: fixed routing flit description, added link to PR

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#67

Post by gooroo »

jacquesm wrote: post #13
hoseja wrote: post #7

What's the killer feature that differentiates Ethernet from other phy protocols?

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…

And it was sniffing heaven. Only paralleled by the brief period of nobody using any serious encryption on their wifi.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#68

Post by asah »

WeylandYutani wrote: post #46
nine_k wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If they went extinct they were not superior.

the best tech doesn't always win, and in fact the "best" tech is typically promoted by people who focus more on the tech and less on go-to-market and competitive strategy. And thus, the "best" tech often loses to the tech that (for example) is better packaged or promoted.

Python is a nice example: inelegant language with many deep flaws, but easy syntax and "batteries included" won the day.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#69

Post by magic_hamster »

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

It's worth mentioning Moore's Law, which was actually a short term prediction, arguably turned into a business goal. The "law" states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits (like CPUs) will be doubled every two years (or 18 months by some variations). It wasn't entirely made up, as it was mostly based on advances in manufacturing technology, but it was a prediction made in 1965 that was supposed to hold for ten years. However reality kept up with this prediction for far longer than anticipated until the physical limits of silicon miniaturization became apparent in recent (ish) years, until the mid 00's (maybe later?).

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#70

Post by PenguinCoder »

gooroo wrote: post #63
drewg123 wrote: post #58

Back when I was doing a lot of ethernet driver work, I joked to colleagues about what I'd do if I had a time machine. Go back and kill Hitler? no. Go back and stop John Wilkes Booth from shooting Lincoln? No. I'd go back and convince Bob Metcalfe to make ethernet headers 16 bytes rather than 14 to avoid all sorts of annoying alignment issues

Yeah those alignment issues surely have killed more jews than that Hitler guy. /s

> *joked* to colleagues
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