181–190 of 238 posts
"Captain Bob" we called him, at 3Com. In "The Big Bucks" I have two quotes from him, which he graciously allowed me to use as something he would have said (they're not very exciting). Normally I never have a real person appear and do anything; at most people speak of them in the third person. In "Inventing the Future" I have the 1978 story about the lightning strike that took down the Ethernet between PARC and SDD. B…
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This part's not in the book: Gordon Peterson, the architect of ARCNet, was a major source for me. He talked to Bob back in the day. Gordon's still bitter about it, and will gladly tell you why Ethernet is inferior.
Ethernet is one of those case studies in "worse is better". I remember the old saying that "Ethernet doesn't work in theory, but it does in practice". Mostly referring to the CSMA/CD scheme used before switches took over. The competitive advantage of being built out of cheap commodity hardware and cabling is hard to overstate. Nobody likes dealing with vendors, their salespeople, and especially support contracts. Esp…
Many press commentators opined that of course "broadband" would be much better than "baseband" since it could carry voice and video, not just bits.
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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 hol…
I think it technically kept going into the early 2010s due to additional advancements and technically it hasn’t yet stopped but people are generally skeptical that TSMC and Samsung can keep this party going (a party that seems to have stopped for Intel itself apparently). Dennard scaling though did end in the mid 00s and this impacted Koomey’s law which talks about performance/watt and saw a similar petering out. App…
This was a bit of a bummer for programmers working in single threaded languages who found that their code stopped getting faster for free.
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…
They ARE more reliable.
I much rather use ethernet than wifi on desktops and laptop.
Now with video meetings, high quality webcams, mics and gaming, latency and bandwith is king.
WiFi is usually FAST but it is not as STABLE.
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"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?
https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf offers this and several other lines of evidence that the law is wrong, and O(n log(n)) is a more accurate scaling law.
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
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This part's not in the book: Gordon Peterson, the architect of ARCNet, was a major source for me. He talked to Bob back in the day. Gordon's still bitter about it, and will gladly tell you why Ethernet is inferior.
Ethernet is one of those case studies in "worse is better". I remember the old saying that "Ethernet doesn't work in theory, but it does in practice". Mostly referring to the CSMA/CD scheme used before switches took over. The competitive advantage of being built out of cheap commodity hardware and cabling is hard to overstate. Nobody likes dealing with vendors, their salespeople, and especially support contracts. Esp…
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…
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.
- Bob Metcalfe
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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.
Hubs max out at 100Mbps. Everybody today is using Gigabit, so they're effectively extinct. Even at 100Mbps hubs were on the way out. They were pretty hacky. The hardware had two different hubs internally and joined them together with a bit of logic, but that logic was somewhat failure prone and it was common to have 10/100 hubs where the 10 clients couldn't talk with the 100 clients and vice versa. Autodetection was…
Indeed - I still have a couple that I used for packet sniffing. Thankfully managed switches or switches smart enough to support port mirroring are inexpensive and thus fairly ubiquitous now.