4 ms·

I love Ken's blog posts and this one is right up my alley. > introduced in 1973, Ethernet is the predominant way of wiring computers together. That sentence d

by kloch 3y ago

I love Ken's blog posts and this one is right up my alley. > introduced in 1973, Ethernet is the predominant way of wiring computers together. That sentence does not really convey how hard it was for Ethernet to win the network L1/L2 protocol wars. It was fairly popular right from the start because it worked well enough (better than it should) and was very simple to understand, configure, and operate. It also kept evolving with new media. But there were other systems it had to compete with, in some use cases (ISP's) well into the late 1990's/early 2000's. Engineering workstations (Sun/SGI/IBM/HP) were early adopters but often had to integrate with mainframe/minicomputers running things like: - Token Ring: IBM was the 800lb gorilla at the time - FDDI: supported 100mbps over MMF! - DEC LAT In the PC sector - Novell/IPX: was very popular in the 80's and persisted well into the 1990's. Most DOS games like Doom *only* supported Novell/IPX - Macintosh: AppleTalk - There were many other proprietary PC/DOS protocols but they were not memorable In the ISP sector - Ethernet was very popular but consistently lagged in supporting the fastest link speeds that ISP's needed. The industry rapidly shifted to 1G (1999) and 10G (2003) Ethernet once they became widely available. - FDDI: 100mbps over MMF. The MAE-EAST peering exchange in the mid 1990's used DEC Gigaswitches with unique switched FDDI 100mbps Full-Duplex mode where each port was it's own separate FDDI domain. - ATM: Telco types last gasp at optimizing for circuit switched networks (phone calls) at the expense of packet switched networks like TCP/IP. ATM over Sonet/SDH however supported much faster link speeds initially. - Packet over Sonet/SDH: Allows the use full-size TCP/IP packets over high speed fiber (Sonet/SDH) links without ATM segmentation. This is what many OC3-OC48 ISP circuits were running before 1GE/10GE took over. There were probably many dozens of other competitors that even I'm too young to remember. Some of these were later modified to run over Ethernet as you can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethertype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethertype

pdw 3y ago
Didn't IPX always run on top of Ethernet? I thought it was pretty much a direct derivative of Xerox PARC's research network protocol.
- wmf 3y ago
  Did IPX run on ARCnet? I remember ARCnet being popular in the DOS world.
  - jdofaz 3y ago
    Seems so https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/internetworking/troubleshooting/guide/tr1908.pdf https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/internetworking/troubleshoo... NetWare runs on Ethernet/IEEE 802.3, Token Ring/IEEE 802.5, Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), Copper Distributed Data Interface (CDDI), and ARCnet. NetWare also works over synchronous wide-area network (WAN) links using the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP)
- peteri 3y ago
  It ran on top of several things. I remember the company I worked for (Alfa Systems) uploading IPX drivers to Novell for testing over a modem using IPX as a protocol. Alfa designed Sage Mainlan originally a z8530 + RS485(?) PC card followed by a 10Mbps Ethernet with our own chip design (Enzo) fabbed as an ASIC by Toshiba. We wrote IPX drivers for both versions. Interestingly we could hang systems with the 3COM cards in our test systems if we ran at full speed and at somepoint we had the full 500 metres of thick ethernet in the office. The IPX version that came with Netware 3 was rather nice, I seem to recall it had a buffer of segments and these got filled by the different layers of the network stack as needed along with some fancy protocol filtering so your code only saw just the data packets it was interested in.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  It could, but not the further step of running on top of TCP/IP, which is why software like Kali [0] was needed if you wanted to play over the internet. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software)

by kloch 3y ago

pdw 3y ago

Didn't IPX always run on top of Ethernet? I thought it was pretty much a direct derivative of Xerox PARC's research network protocol.

wmf 3y ago
Did IPX run on ARCnet? I remember ARCnet being popular in the DOS world.
- jdofaz 3y ago
  Seems so https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/internetworking/troubleshooting/guide/tr1908.pdf https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/internetworking/troubleshoo... NetWare runs on Ethernet/IEEE 802.3, Token Ring/IEEE 802.5, Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), Copper Distributed Data Interface (CDDI), and ARCnet. NetWare also works over synchronous wide-area network (WAN) links using the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP)
peteri 3y ago
It ran on top of several things. I remember the company I worked for (Alfa Systems) uploading IPX drivers to Novell for testing over a modem using IPX as a protocol. Alfa designed Sage Mainlan originally a z8530 + RS485(?) PC card followed by a 10Mbps Ethernet with our own chip design (Enzo) fabbed as an ASIC by Toshiba. We wrote IPX drivers for both versions. Interestingly we could hang systems with the 3COM cards in our test systems if we ran at full speed and at somepoint we had the full 500 metres of thick ethernet in the office. The IPX version that came with Netware 3 was rather nice, I seem to recall it had a buffer of segments and these got filled by the different layers of the network stack as needed along with some fancy protocol filtering so your code only saw just the data packets it was interested in.
Terr_ 3y ago
It could, but not the further step of running on top of TCP/IP, which is why software like Kali [0] was needed if you wanted to play over the internet. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software)