Ethernet was XNS/ITP when it first started. That protocol splintered into DECnet, AppleTalk, Novell and TCP/IP. The advent of async-TCP/IP on commodity hardware

Ethernet was XNS/ITP when it first started. That protocol splintered into DECnet, AppleTalk, Novell and TCP/IP. The advent of async-TCP/IP on commodity hardware (aka Microsoft RAS) caused it to takeover the game and created the dystopia we have now (with nightly national news warning our parents and grandparents that Russia is readying a “cyberattack” that will shutdown the power running their oxygen machines and hearing aide chargers). TCP/IP could transcend LANs and WANs without special NNBs (now called routers) for the first time. (Prior to that, WAN communications were distance-priced, making it cost prohibitive for spammers or disenfranchised kids in USSR ghettos to cause your local hospital to become locked out during surgeries —your local hospital built from the success of the Allied Forces, likely including your parents and grand parents.) Disclaimer: VMS device drivers for third-party Unibus Ethernet adapter board bc DEC wasn’t shipping them yet (due to the albatrosses of PCL, DECnet and later OSI). I later went to DEC and SynOptics, but didn’t even know Thompson was at SynOptics. (They had hired a genius European foreign national as software manager from a company down the street bc he wanted to remain in US and he, in turn, hired a 70s-series Indian to mentor off me, but instead he violated accepted business ethics, used our practices against us and caused millions of dollars worth of damage to SynOptics and Me personally…they tried to fire him but HR kicked it back and in fury, they transferred him to HR and ordered him not to touch any computers until he quit and went to work across the street for a competitor (ultimate betrayal by Valley rules) and eventually wound up a VP —of HR— for the famous Pagoda owner! Glad I can laugh about it all now. I sat next to John Chaimberlain many years later when a Chinese presenter said SynOpsis in a thick tone that sounded like SynOptics and John raised his hand and asked why we were bringing up that mess again. LoL Just ramblings of now irrelevant things that went on in the exciting years before the dot-com bubble changed the players.