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Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

amturing.acm.org

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Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#71

Post by [deleted] »

chasd00 wrote: post #51
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…

I remember trying to get NICs to work in Linux and the best advice was usually “just try the 3c509 driver”.

[deleted]

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#72

Post by drewg123 »

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

Lol. No, its more like everybody will line up take care of those more important things when they get access to a time machine, but when I get access to a time machine, I want to take care of my pet peeve :)

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#73

Post by jacquesm »

mkovach wrote: post #54
jacquesm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a lot less ugly than whatever else passed for networking standards at the physical level in those days. Arcnet, Twinax, Token Ring and so on, I've probably used them all, and at scale. Compared to Ethernet they all sucked, besides being proprietary they were slow, prone to breaking in very complex to troubleshoot ways (though ethernet had its own interesting failure modes in practice it was far more reliable),…

Oh good heavens. Arcnet! When I first learned about writing Linux device drivers, it was trying to get a decent driver for some Arcnet cards that the company I worked at as using in some client installations. Can't remember exactly why we never completed it (well, yea I do. Ethernet worked better, a lot better) but since we never "released the product" they never let us send in the driver we did write to the kernel m…

> Now, I feel old. Time for a nap.

Join the club...

And it all seems like yesterday.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#74

Post by madmax108 »

Congrats Bob!

If anyone's interested in the history of the early internet, I recently read the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner and it is a very interesting read about how we went from ARPA to WWW, including a lot of the warts you associate with large scale projects like ARPANet grew into (and the book features Metcalfe quite extensively when talking about Ethernet and ALOHAnet).

Honestly, it's nice to see technology like ethernet, which is both "as simple as it should be but no simpler", and has also stood the test of time get recognized and rewarded!

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#75

Post by citrin_ru »

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…

Ethernet evolved in backward compatible way for more than 30 years. If we would design a new standard from scratch to fit the same use cases we in theory can learn from the experience and improve things but at the same it would be hard to resist a temptation to make it future-proof by adding a lot of things just in case and this new standard likely will be even more wasteful. And having opportunity doesn't mean it will be used. I often see new design make mistakes avoided in older designs because people have limited time to learn and body of knowledge is too large to always successfully learn from the past.

Also hardware is not like software where you can rewrite a site using a JS framework of the day every few years. Compatibility is really important.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#77

Post by xbar »

chasd00 wrote: post #51
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…

I remember trying to get NICs to work in Linux and the best advice was usually “just try the 3c509 driver”.

Practically a mantra.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#78

Post by eddieroger »

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.

Betamax was superior to VHS, and it went the way of the dinosaur. Sometimes better means more expensive, and that's not always the popular choice. It wasn't the better survivor, but it was the better format. First to market, higher res, smaller tape, longer life, still lost. But don't take my word for it. https://kodakdigitizing.com/blogs/news/what-is-the-differenc...

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#79

Post by mhandley »

ethbr0 wrote: post #30
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 would you have used (prior to affordable switches) instead of CSMA/CD?

There were a number of ring-based technologies such as Cambridge Ring that even predate Ethernet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Ring_(computer_netwo...

The main reason Ethernet won, I think, is that it was really easy to deploy incrementally. It was much more plug-and-play than anything else at the time.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#80

Post by Sporktacular »

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?

The point was more about competing technical choices made by designers, rather than the choice of standards made by consumers. For example TDMA can be arguably more scalable, bandwidth and energy efficient than CSMA/CD and can give consistent PL, PD and PDV, so might have even allowed early business grade voice. Variable header sizes would have allowed efficient use over bandwidth constrained media like radio. But the low cost and fast success of Ethernet formed a barrier to entry for competing LAN standards, where those arguably better technical choices may have found a footing.

They eventually found application in other non-LAN standards, so guess royalties weren't an issue.

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