Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award • Hacker News Board

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#101

Post by bombcar » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #33

wistlo wrote: post #25

The archetypal "good enough" solution: Instead of preventing collisions, tolerating and managing them. I think of Ethernet often when assessing how close to perfection I need to get in my work.

It is also lesson of doing something now and rewriting it later. For example no modern ethernet network uses cd/csma anymore and it was pretty iconic part of original ethernet. Overall ethernet on physical layer has seen quite an evolution from coax and vampire taps, to twisted pair and hubs, to switched networks, and nowdays wireless, single-pair, optical, and virtual networks

I remember when hubs were still common; I don't know if any have been made for decades. Even bargain basement switches are switched now, and often even have spanning tree and other 'previously enterprise' features.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#102

Post by oh_sigh » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

lr4444lr wrote: post #56

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 respect Metcalfe a lot, but halfway through undergraduate discrete math it was pretty obvious to most people in the class even before seeing a formal proof that a fully connected graph has O(n^2) edges. I just figured that people wowed by "Metcalfe's Law" were business types who didn't any formal theory into computing.

Metcalfe's law is about network impact or value, not about connections.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#103

Post by bombcar » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:10 PM UTC

eddieroger wrote: post #78

WeylandYutani wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Superior includes cost, and even things like number of suppliers.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#104

Post by xen2xen1 » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

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”.

Similar to "try the HP 4si driver" for printers?

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#105

Post by bombcar » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #81

ethbr0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I had a bunch of workloads that quite literally got cut down to about 15% or so of the original runtime (a cluster compressing a whole archive of CDs for a large broadcaster) so I happily paid up. But still... $1000 / port!! And here I have sitting next to me a 48 port gigabit switch that cost 15% of what that 100 megabit switch cost in 1996 or so. Iirc it was one of the first D-link products I bought, it definitely…

And you can get switches for less than $25 per 10gb port now.

Of course the jump from 10mb hub to 100mb switch was much larger than any of the later jumps, just because of the reduced noise.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#106

Post by bombcar » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #37

asimpletune wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it’s a very cool trick that surprises a lot of people when they learn that only half the wires are used.

Not for gigabit ethernet and good luck picking up the pieces if you find yourself splitting a power-over-ethernet setup :)

Reminds me of the "REAL" power over ethernet: http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#107

Post by throw0101b » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

Somewhat related:

The choice of 48 bits for the hardware/station address seems to have been a pretty good choice: it's been 40+ years and we still have no run out. I'm curious to know if anyone has done the math on when Ethernet address exhaustion will occur.

While the Ethernet frame has been tweaked with over the decades, addressing has been steady. Curious to know if any transition will ever been needed and how would that work.

In hindsight, IP's (initial) 32 bit address was too small, though for a network that was (primarily) created for research purposes, but ended up escaping 'into the wild' and accidentally becoming production, it was probably a reasonable choice: who expected >4 billion hosts on an academic/research-only network?

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#108

Post by asciii » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:28 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #102

lr4444lr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect Metcalfe a lot, but halfway through undergraduate discrete math it was pretty obvious to most people in the class even before seeing a formal proof that a fully connected graph has O(n^2) edges. I just figured that people wowed by "Metcalfe's Law" were business types who didn't any formal theory into computing.

Metcalfe's law is about network impact or value, not about connections.

Was it not specifically "compatibly communicating devices" or something and not users like how it was marketed.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#109

Post by throw0101b » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

xbar wrote: post #89

lambda_dn wrote: post #65

Wifi/5G guys next? Much more important invention in my opinion

From 1990, the 802.11 standards body was gyrating on radio-based 802.11 ideas. That body would not even have existed without Ethernet.

And Ethernet may not have existed without work of the ALOHAnet:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet

Ideas feed ideas, giants/shoulders, etc.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#110

Post by throw0101b » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

peterfirefly wrote: post #90

jacquesm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give it 30 years. And the one wouldn't be there without the other.

WiFi would definitely be here now with or without Ethernet.

Wireless (packet/frame) networks were around before Ethernet:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet