Chaosnet in active use, mostly on emulators: https://chaosnet.net/
Lispm, PDP-10, PDP-11, VAX.
Chaosnet (1981)
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Re: Chaosnet (1981)
#12I only know of this because the CADR emulator supports an emulated version of it.
Re: Chaosnet (1981)
#13I only know of this because the CADR emulator supports an emulated version of it.
It is also capable of doing it over the wire.
Re: Chaosnet (1981)
#14It says it was inspired by Ethernet, and while modern Ethernet might have some significant differences of course, what were the differences between Chaosnet and the Ethernet of the time?
Re: Chaosnet (1981)
#15"The transmission medium of Chaosnet is called the ether. Physically it is a coaxial cable, of the semi-rigid 1/2 inch low-loss type used for cable TV, with 75-ohm termination at both ends. At each network node a cable transceiver is attached to the cable. A 10-meter flat cable connects the transceiver to an interface which is attached to a computer’s I/O bus." [...] "The transceiver receives a differential digital s…
It is. This is what they mean by an aether - a wire connecting several computers so that any of them can send an electrical signal they will all receive. Ethernet was named after this, but doesn't use an ether any more.
In this design you need a way to make computers take turns. CSMA/CD is the stupidest: wait until nobody is transmitting before you transmit, and if two nodes start transmitting at the same moment, both abort.
Re: Chaosnet (1981)
#16It says it was inspired by Ethernet, and while modern Ethernet might have some significant differences of course, what were the differences between Chaosnet and the Ethernet of the time?
Chaosnet was inspired by the experimental 3 Mbits/s Ethernet in use at Xerox PARC at the time. Experimental Ethernet has a 8-bit node address; Chaosnet has 16 bits, of which 8 is network and another 8 is the node. The Chaosnet data rate is 4 Mbits/s.
On top of the hardware protocol, Chaosnet also defined the higher-level transport and session layer protocol. Applications are addressed by a name string rather than a port number; e.g. "TELNET" instead of 23. This protocol was retained when the NIC hardware was replaced with stock Ethernet.