6 ms·
40th Anniversary of the Ethernet
- alblue 6y agoIn case you wondered where MTU or MAC addresses came from, they are right here in the original Ethernet paper.
- greenie_beans 6y agoCool. It’s neat that some ideas from the original Ethernet paper are still used today. I wonder how it’ll be 100 years from now —- will we still use MAC addresses?
- iso1210 6y agoWe'll still be on ipv4, that's for certain -- ipv6 will be just around the corner.
- alblue 6y agoIPv6 has been around for ages, but it has started picking up over the past couple of years. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
- greenie_beans 6y agolol, touche
- throw0101a 6y agoThey used the date of creation of the 10 Mb/s DIX paper (published in ACM in 1981) for the anniversary, but there was an earlier 1976 ACM paper: * https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1920/CompNet/files/p395-metcalfe.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1920/CompNet/files/p395-me... * https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/360248.360253 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/360248.360253 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet#History
- yrro 6y agoI wonder why the broadcast address was changed from being all zeroes to all ones in Ethernet II (is that the right term for the Ethernet we all use today?)
- alblue 6y agoThere are actually two papers; Ethernet 1.0 and 2.0, but the ones linked above were for the <256 draft implementation.
- alblue 6y agoYes, the draft was mentioned in the article as well. However the version 1.0 paper was dated 30th September 1980, although it wasn’t in the ACM until the following year.
- jessaustin 6y agoThis is so interesting! Somehow I had never learned of the "random delay" that apparently is the basis of how Ethernet works.
- zokier 6y agoWell, the random delay thing is not really relevant in modern switched networks where each switch port is a separate collision domain. The whole core concept of Ethernet of a shared "ether" which messages are sent through has pretty much died because switched networks provide better performance and moores law made them economical
- mhalle 6y agoWhat about WiFi, and the adage, "you can't switch air"?
- zamadatix 6y ago802.11 handles it, the Ethernet frames just see things as being switched with a lot of buffering and random delay.
- tsomctl 6y agoCheck out CDMA. There's a blog owned by one of the original engineers at Qualcomm that goes into the history and theory of CDMA. Unfortunately I can't find it.
- p1mrx 6y agoWiFi travels through space, which happens to contain air for pragmatic reasons. Wouldn't SDMA qualify as "switching space"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-division_multiple_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-division_multiple_access
- stephc_int13 6y agoI am curious to see how it will compare to more recent protocols such as USB or Bluetooth.
- iso1210 6y agoIn general, ethernet doesn't do collision detect now - practically every wired ethernet goes from a machine to a switch on a full duplex link, with the switch having buffers to cope with collisions - worst case the second packet is discarded, no need to back off at a random interval. Does wireless ethernet have CSMA/CD, or is it some better time based protocol?
- vlovich123 6y agoBoth. There’s collision detection for interference. The actual devices on the AP itself time slice access.
- scurvy 6y agoYeah the main difference is wireless devices use Collision Avoidance rather than Collision Detection.
- imglorp 6y agoRobert Metcalfe gave a great interview with Tim Ferriss not long ago. He has some sharp insights and stories to tell. https://tim.blog/2018/02/14/bob-metcalfe/ https://tim.blog/2018/02/14/bob-metcalfe/
- drewg123 6y agoIf I had a time machine, rather than killing Hitler, I'd go back and convince them to make the ethernet header 16 bytes rather than 14 in order to keep things nicely aligned. A 14 byte header causes lots of alignment issues.. I first encountered this on DEC Alpha, pre-byte/word extensions. When using network drivers not designed for alpha, the kernel would take an alignment fault when accessing 4-byte IP addresses which were aligned on a 2 byte boundary.
- toast0 6y agoWhile you're back there, please have them implement router based IP fragmentation as simple truncation (and some flag), rather than turning it into two packets or dropping and sending an out of band response that often gets lost.
- yardshop 6y ago> The original implementation used coaxial cable, as it was widely available for TV sets, to be able to act as the physical layer of the network – although with coaxial/10Base2 networks, the end of the co-axial cable run required the use of a terminator to avoid signal reflection. Reminds me of the early 90s when I convinced our company to try LANtastic instead of the bulky IBM Token Ring network we had at the time. Tiny coax cables with BNC connectors and terminators, and no central server or MAU. Each workstation was its own "server" and we could finally use our IBM AT for actual work instead of having its RAM stuffed full with IBM network management software! Hell of a lot cheaper too!
- fulafel 6y agoEthernet has had such a long run. Now at 200 gigabits per second: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Broadcom-bnxt_en-200G-Linux https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Broadcom...
- p1mrx 6y agoEthernet in the consumer space has been stuck at 1 Gbps for decades (1000BASE-T dates back to 1999.) I'm waiting to see a basic 8-port >= 2.5 Gbps switch for under $100.