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How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

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Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#51

Post by Alupis »

ianburrell wrote: post #39
Alupis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The IPv4 address field is fixed size. So? Make it bigger, call it IPv7, then enjoy. IPv6 has 128 bits for addresses, why can't IPv7 have 128 bits as well, but still use more familiar patterns/techniques borrowed from IPv4? IPv6 threw just about everything out the window... for what reason? Two decades of confusion and resistance... I think at this point in time, people are afraid to say "ya, we overthought the hell…

Nothing in the world can work with IPv7. That means need to update all the software and replace all the hardware. This takes years of effort, and years of time. What more familiar techniques? How are they going to be worth the millions of man-hours to implement? How are they going to be so much better that people will abandon IPv6 and switch from IPv4? Could this be accomplished by changing part of IPv6? It is quite…

> Nothing in the world can work with IPv7. That means need to update all the software and replace all the hardware. This takes years of effort, and years of time.

Uh, you mean like IPv6?

IPv6 once was new, and it was radical at the time (still mostly is). IPv4 should have just been extended to a 128 bit address space, breaking changes implemented around that, and then everything else would have been easier to adopt. No relearning everything - just rationalizing about larger address space.

> It is quite possible that you are using IPv6 to access Hacker News without knowing it.

No I am not, because our IT Dept. disables IPv6 on all workstations and doesn't support them at our gateways. IPv6 was the culprit in a lot of networking issues that just magically "go away" when disabled... so, they disable.

The decades and decades of knowledge built around IPv4 is immense. IPv6 asked everyone to forget almost all of it and start over. It's really not surprising IPv6 is still not well adopted...

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#53

Post by panick21_ »

I always wondered why it took so long to go from 10 Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s. For sure in that time they invented things like Ethernet Switching. But still, it seems like that standard took forever to move on. And then once it did it went from 100Mbit/s to 1000Mbit/s per second pretty damn fast.

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#55

Post by devilbunny »

panick21_ wrote: post #53

I always wondered why it took so long to go from 10 Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s. For sure in that time they invented things like Ethernet Switching. But still, it seems like that standard took forever to move on. And then once it did it went from 100Mbit/s to 1000Mbit/s per second pretty damn fast.

10 Mbps was fine for, frankly, just about anything under 100 MB. And since 100 Mbps hubs were rare beasts, most being switches, they stayed a lot more expensive for a long time. Hell, my first home network was 10 Mbps on thinnet because it was so much cheaper than a 10 Mbps hub, and that was ca. 1997. I'd had 100 Mbps available in the dorms the year before, but you were looking at $250 for 100 vs $40 or less for 10 - which, in college student dollars, is a lot.

When we had hard drives that barely topped 1 GB, which could be copied in under 17 minutes even on 10 Mbps, there just wasn't a huge incentive to upgrade speed. But once 100 made sense for homes - supporting 802.11g - the price of switches fell rapidly because it was no longer just businesses buying them. And so 1 Gbps fell more quickly, because the background hardware was getting cheaper.

My 1998 computer with 100 Mbps and a 6.4 GB drive got used a few times as the piracy data exfiltration machine because it could pull down the 5 GB of stuff we'd accumulated so much faster, then plug it up to the three-apartment network we had set up and let everyone pull it to their own machines on the 10 Mbps we had there. Our outgoing connection was a Linux box on a 56k connection shared among six of us; it's not like 10 Mbps slowed any of that down.

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#56

Post by Solvency »

beachy wrote: post #23

> Mark’s idea didn’t replace Ethernet—and that was its brilliance. By allowing store-and-forward switching between existing CSMA/CD coax-based Ethernets, bridges allowed easy upgrades of existing LANs. This reminds me of John Carmack's philosophy of great things coming from thinking locally and taking small steps. > Carmack subscribes to the philosophy that small, incremental steps are the fastest route to meaningful…

That last paragraph is literally the same basic sentence about "little steps" written three times in slightly different ways.

Did you get this quote from an AI written SEOspam site?

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#57

Post by kccqzy »

Alupis wrote: post #27
themerone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a surprising number of people who think you could magically expand the IPv4 address space in a backwards compatible manner.

I believe it's more along the lines of the concepts in IPv4 are easier to grasp than IPv6, starting with the actual addresses themselves. IPv6 breaks all backwards compatibility. So, it's not unreasonable for people to ask why we can't just break it in a more familiar way? Extending IPv4 into say, IPv7 and using familiar addressing schemes, well understood routing/NAT/DHCP techniques, etc, while providing the same us…

What are you exactly asking for? Sure it's not recommended but you can have NAT66 for IPv6, and DHCPv6 for IPv6. You can choose to configure your own IPv6 network in a way that's familiar to IPv4. Not exactly best practice but doable.

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#58

Post by beachy »

Solvency wrote: post #56
beachy wrote: post #23

> Mark’s idea didn’t replace Ethernet—and that was its brilliance. By allowing store-and-forward switching between existing CSMA/CD coax-based Ethernets, bridges allowed easy upgrades of existing LANs. This reminds me of John Carmack's philosophy of great things coming from thinking locally and taking small steps. > Carmack subscribes to the philosophy that small, incremental steps are the fastest route to meaningful…

That last paragraph is literally the same basic sentence about "little steps" written three times in slightly different ways. Did you get this quote from an AI written SEOspam site?

Ha ha, it came from Wikipedia so possibly.

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#59

Post by djbusby »

Waterluvian wrote: post #4
gumby wrote: post #2

What a great story. The spanning tree algo is under appreciated: this allowed people who didn’t understand networking to plug networks together the way you would plug extension power cables together,* making networking simple ( or alternatively insanely broken, when people had 400 computers on a single LAN with a rat’s nest of bridges and hubs…but unlike the extension cord case, nothing would catch literal fire). * d…

> but unlike the extension cord case, nothing would catch literal fire Somewhere, out there, is a story of an overburdened network setup literally catching fire, and it’s hopefully making its way to us.

I saw one sorta catch fire.

But it wasn't over burdened.

It was in the kitchen, cause that was also where the utility closet is. and our 100+ year old building has crappy/dirty power, frequent brown-outs.

So, a few weeks of splashing coffee, tea and other crap around, and our crap power the thing started humming (60Hz). Then one day POP! Cap blew out and there was a little smoke.

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#60

Post by djbusby »

rini17 wrote: post #14
themerone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a surprising number of people who think you could magically expand the IPv4 address space in a backwards compatible manner.

But this was what literally happened. All routers today support NAT and most of them actively use it. Isn't it a magical form of extended IPv4 address space? Could have been easily done in less band-aid fashion instead of chasing IPv6.

NAT doesn't change IP Header size, just the contents - while staying the same size. The header size is a requirement for compatibility.
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