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How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#101

Post by therealcamino »

mannyv wrote: post #66

One side effect of the network switch was that you needed to buy switches. With the old way everyone could be on one wire. With the new way you needed one port per host. Switches also allowed for centralized management. Note that cable works on what essentially is token ring, at least conceptually; channel 0 (i believe, it's been a while) is the heartbeat.

If you were ever responsible for keeping a thicknet or thinnet Ethernet network running, you would gladly accept that tradeoff. If you've experienced a floor of a building or a whole department go offline because someone removed a terminator, or (this is real) decided to stick the thinnet onto their radio antenna to see if it improved reception, you'd value the increase in reliability a lot more than the extra cost.

There were actually these connectors you could get from AMP that would hide away the thinnet connection behind a wall plate, with proprietary connectors to the machine, just to keep people's hands away from the shared network segment.

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#102

Post by BuildTheRobots »

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

I might be taking this too literally (I fell down the Kunsberg Bridge rabbithole recently), but with only one input on nearly all extension cords, I don't see how you'd get into a position of "fire" rather than "nothing happening".

Even if you did have two ways of putting power into your extension lead, it wouldn't necessarily lead to fire; household "ring" circuits (still very common in UK houses) are by definition a loop.

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#103

Post by therealcamino »

thfuran wrote: post #92
EricE wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that crazy? 1 gig is overkill for the vast majority of people as it is.

You (well, perhaps not specifically you, depending on your address) can easily get a consumer internet package that'd fully saturate 1gbps. You can buy consumer wireless access points that can serve over 1gbps. You can buy consumer network drives which are physically capable of saturating 10gbps. Modern USB already has transfer rates higher than 10gbps. It's far less outlandishly fast than 1gbps was when that was rol…

Yes, the things it's connected to can saturate a 1 Gbps link. But few people feel any pain points that would lead them to want to upgrade. I've only ever saturated mine with speed test sites.

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#104

Post by bluGill »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #98
bluGill wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so we did what you proposed. Ipv6 is simpler than ipv4. You can handwave details different but they all suffe, from the same problem of rollout.

You have a unique definition of simple.

I have actually seen the protocol specs for both IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 is simpler than IPv4 - but you probably never looked into how to do source address routing which you are required to support when you implement IPv4 even though nobody uses it (If you try I'm sure that the large backbone providers will block it)

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#105

Post by wil421 »

rational_indian wrote: post #99
wil421 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Audio Video buddy has a very similar story. A school called because their newish PA system wasn’t working. Turns out the usual lady was out. The usual lady would rip the cord out of the wall every evening instead of pressing the power button. The stand in announcer was just trying to press the on off button like most normal people. They ended up having to replace expensive equipment because the person wouldn’t sto…

I think American houses don't have a power switch per outlet like the rest of the world. The only way some (most?) devices can be turned off is by pulling the cord.

Not it’s not at all. Do you turn a computer or tv off by pulling the cord? No, you turn it off by a switch/button or in the GUI if it has one. I’m from the US.

If you had a stero system at your house you would not pull the cord to turn it off. Wow.

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#106

Post by Arrath »

wil421 wrote: post #105
rational_indian wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think American houses don't have a power switch per outlet like the rest of the world. The only way some (most?) devices can be turned off is by pulling the cord.

Not it’s not at all. Do you turn a computer or tv off by pulling the cord? No, you turn it off by a switch/button or in the GUI if it has one. I’m from the US. If you had a stero system at your house you would not pull the cord to turn it off. Wow.

Some places/people have a concern (complex?) about standby or parasitic power draw.

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#107

Post by firecall »

firecall wrote: post #18
spintin wrote: post #3

[flagged]

Has IPv6 been a failure? All I know is that IPv4 is still around. And without knowing the IP Addresses of devices on my LAN, by home network would be harder to manage!

Why the downvotes!

It was an honest question!

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#108

Post by EricE »

thfuran wrote: post #92
EricE wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that crazy? 1 gig is overkill for the vast majority of people as it is.

You (well, perhaps not specifically you, depending on your address) can easily get a consumer internet package that'd fully saturate 1gbps. You can buy consumer wireless access points that can serve over 1gbps. You can buy consumer network drives which are physically capable of saturating 10gbps. Modern USB already has transfer rates higher than 10gbps. It's far less outlandishly fast than 1gbps was when that was rol…

I have gigabit internet and the only time it even remotely comes close to saturation is when Steam kicks off a large update. And then it's done, in minutes at a most.

Unless you are copying large media files around all day, gigabit is complete overkill for the vast majority of people.

Re: How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

#109

Post by pezezin »

rational_indian wrote: post #99
wil421 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Audio Video buddy has a very similar story. A school called because their newish PA system wasn’t working. Turns out the usual lady was out. The usual lady would rip the cord out of the wall every evening instead of pressing the power button. The stand in announcer was just trying to press the on off button like most normal people. They ended up having to replace expensive equipment because the person wouldn’t sto…

I think American houses don't have a power switch per outlet like the rest of the world. The only way some (most?) devices can be turned off is by pulling the cord.

European power outlets don't have switches either.
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