13 ms·

How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

264 points by hasheddan 3y ago

gumby 3y ago
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). * don’t try this at home or work!
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  > but unlike the extension cord case, nothing would catch literal fire Somewhere, out there, is a story of an overburdened network setup literally catching fire, and it’s hopefully making its way to us.
  - genericone 3y ago
    C'mon HN, I'm counting on you...
  - djbusby 3y ago
    I saw one sorta catch fire. But it wasn't over burdened. It was in the kitchen, cause that was also where the utility closet is. and our 100+ year old building has crappy/dirty power, frequent brown-outs. So, a few weeks of splashing coffee, tea and other crap around, and our crap power the thing started humming (60Hz). Then one day POP! Cap blew out and there was a little smoke.
  - EricE 3y ago
    Seen more than my fair share of magic smoke from lightning or near lightning strikes. Also fried more than a few ports on devices when passive POE used to be more prevalent :p
- jeramey 3y ago
  Occasionally people don't understand how to plug extension power cables together, either, especially during times of high stress and low sleep. Once upon a time, when I was in IT support, I got a call from someone in a satellite office across town saying that their computer wouldn't turn on. A new production had begun and everyone was a bit frantic, so this was an urgent request. After asking them to hold the power switch in for a few seconds and try to turn it on again, I asked them to make sure the power cable was secure and that the computer was plugged in. It was, of course, but the computer still wouldn't turn on, so it was time to jump on the bicycle and ride across town with a new power supply in tow, figuring it would be a quick fix. When I arrive, I see that, indeed, the computer was plugged in to a power strip. And that power strip was plugged in to itself. From then on, I always made sure to ask, "Is the computer plugged into the wall?" Saved myself a few bicycle trips that way.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    heh, with power strips that have very long cables, I've seen them plugged into themselves a few times as well.
    - Arrath 3y ago
      Like tying a shoelace: the long grey cord goes around the backside of the desk, turns and comes around the front, and back into its own powerstrip. ..Wait why won't it turn on?
  - firecall 3y ago
    I was really hoping for some never before known knowledge of how to connect Extension Cables and Power Boards together! But no, turns out someone didnt even manage the basics! LOL There's a reason the IT Crowd have the running joke of 'have you tried turning it off and on again...'! :-)
    - jeramey 3y ago
      In all fairness, the person had obviously been awake for over 24 hours and was on their 1,001st cup of coffee. And since earlier in the summer I had crashed the entire ticket scanner network the night before the opening of the weekend festival we had put on by creating a network loop between a couple of non-spanning-tree-speaking network devices, I didn't feel I was in a place to be snarky about it!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 486sx33 3y ago
  Not recommended but these bad boys make a lot of things work, and cause a lot of damage! https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61A5WvzcgsL._AC_UL960_QL65_.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61A5WvzcgsL._AC_UL960_QL...
- non-chalad 3y ago
  Too late: Tried this at work; Did a marvelous job sharing satellite internet with the whole barracks.
  - gumby 3y ago
    Sounds like things worked out, even if all you shared was your porn.
- teleforce 3y ago
  That's why the new Ethernet protocol 802.11aq is recommending Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) as a robust alternative to Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). Not only it's more robust, but it is more secure with extra resilience against broadcast storm. It also can support multi-cast function more easily and intuitively at data-link layer [1],[2]. Compared to the new SPB, STP looks like an immature hacks and why it took so long to be replaced is beyond me. [1]IEEE 802.1aq: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1aq https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1aq [2] 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging Design and Evolution: The Architect's Perspective: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/book/6381532 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/book/6381532
  - throw0101d 3y ago
    > That's why the new Ethernet protocol 802.11aq is recommending Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) as a robust alternative to Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). This is a dead letter standard: most folks who would 'need' SPB are probably using BGP EVPN to reduce the Layer 2 'blast radius'. It should also be noted that the IEEE was dragged kicking and screaming towards SPB: originally TRILL was proposed, but the IEEE rejected it, and so the IETF published: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRILL_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRILL_(computing) IEEE realized their mistake and published SPB, so now there are two L2 standards. Not many folks who either though, with anyone really needing 'large scale' stuff moving towards L3 solutions.
- inopinatus 3y ago
  > people who didn’t understand networking A couple of decades ago I witnessed a classic demonstration of Weinberg's Corollary¹ when a spanning tree misconfiguration on a freshly-installed BlackDiamond disabled LINX for hours, throwing half of Britain's ISP peering into chaos. The switch in question was evidently cursed: it'd been dropped on my foot earlier that week, thus disabling me for hours, and everyone else involved in that project was dead within two years. __ [1] "an expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy"
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    everyone else involved in that project was dead within two years. That's ... quite a legacy.
  - ahazred8ta 3y ago
    The error of a wise man is equal to the combined blunders of a thousand fools.
- Aloha 3y ago
  STP is basically magic - and being able to reliably optimize it to reduce reconvergence time makes you a magician.
  - jbernsteiniv 3y ago
    I feel like STP is basically magic when you first learn it in a course (usually sponsored by Cisco) but the illusion is broken when you learn computer science principles like a graph data structure and how to build an acyclic graph. STP handles this through sending little messages with every node receiving the message appending themselves after whoever sent it. Then a node just checks if it sees itself in the message. If I DO see myself in the chain, I know now I need to not send information to the previous node that sent me the message. The message just needs to be something that'll never succeed but flow through the network. If I have three nodes labeled "A", "B", and "C" then I could send a message intended for "D" (which does not exist in my network). A has a path to B and A has a path to C. B has a path to C and vice versa. Each node can talk to another. A send to B. B checks if its in the chain and if not, it appends itself in the chain. A -> B. B knows it received the message from A so it will ignore this connection and send the message to all of its neighbors. C receives the message from B. C checks if its in the chain and if not, it appends itself in the chain. A > B -> C. C got the message from B so it ignores this path and sends the message to all of its other neighbors (in this case, A). A receives the message and checks if its in the chain (it is). A knows it received the message from C. A now knows that a cycle has been detected, so A disables its connection to C. Congrats! You've designed a tree! Its a graph that contains no cycles. All we had to do was send a message and check if we see ourselves in the chain. If we do, we disable our path to the last node that sent us a message. Of course STP gets more complicated from here as we factor in path costs as weights to measure the decision to axe a connection. Maybe A -> B is a 1G connection and A -> C is a 10G connection, in this case A may disable the path to B. I do agree that reducing reconvergence time is magic. I don't understand that one.
- BuildTheRobots 3y ago
  > 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.
spintin 3y ago
[flagged]
- eej71 3y ago
  I think the great architectural challenge would be - how does one add that byte to the IP header in a non-breaking way?
  - themerone 3y ago
    There's a surprising number of people who think you could magically expand the IPv4 address space in a backwards compatible manner.
    - eej71 3y ago
      It would be great if its true! Perhaps its really there and we're all just blind to it? Unlikely, but I'm willing to be surprised.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        Unfortunately none of those people have explained how it could be done in enough detail that I could try it. Most walk away when pressed but a few press on telling me it is easy so shut up and do it .
        mixmastamyk 3y ago
        Similar to how it has been done with phone numbers. I saw this done in Brazil for example. You add a digit to the front and put all existing address on 0.*. Short number dials are assumed to be 0.*. Update OS and hardware. Then you allocate across the new digit much later as time goes on. The thing with phone infrastructure though is that it is centralized. So may happen in a reasonably coordinated rollout. Global internet is a lot more distributed so it would take a very long time. The open question is, would it take longer than IP6 has? Maybe not. Part of the reason I didn't care to use it early was because of the long addresses. If we could get a five byte address written in hex it would be somewhat user friendly.
beachy 3y ago
> Mark’s idea didn’t replace Ethernet—and that was its brilliance. By allowing store-and-forward switching between existing CSMA/CD coax-based Ethernets, bridges allowed easy upgrades of existing LANs. This reminds me of John Carmack's philosophy of great things coming from thinking locally and taking small steps. > Carmack subscribes to the philosophy that small, incremental steps are the fastest route to meaningful and disruptive innovation. He compares this approach to the "magic of gradient descent" where small steps using local information result in the best outcomes. According to Carmack, this principle is proven by his own experience, and he has observed this in many of the smartest people in the world. He states, "Little tiny steps using local information winds up leading to all the best answers."
- Solvency 3y ago
  That last paragraph is literally the same basic sentence about "little steps" written three times in slightly different ways. Did you get this quote from an AI written SEOspam site?
  - beachy 3y ago
    Ha ha, it came from Wikipedia so possibly.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - itemize 3y ago
      As a barely relevant point, Using google, I can't find references to the quote (or John Carmack) by searching 'Little tiny steps using local information winds up leading to all the best answers'. Other search engines seems to do a bit better on retrieving the Wiki article. What gives, is google really becoming worse?
      - Solvency 3y ago
        It's been at its worst for like 6 years.
inopinatus 3y ago
This is all very well but DEC's greatest contribution to my own networking happiness was perhaps the quad-port Tulip/21143 cards that were my go-to for building reliable FreeBSD-based white-box routers back in the day
panick21_ 3y ago
I always wondered why it took so long to go from 10 Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s. For sure in that time they invented things like Ethernet Switching. But still, it seems like that standard took forever to move on. And then once it did it went from 100Mbit/s to 1000Mbit/s per second pretty damn fast.
- devilbunny 3y ago
  10 Mbps was fine for, frankly, just about anything under 100 MB. And since 100 Mbps hubs were rare beasts, most being switches, they stayed a lot more expensive for a long time. Hell, my first home network was 10 Mbps on thinnet because it was so much cheaper than a 10 Mbps hub, and that was ca. 1997. I'd had 100 Mbps available in the dorms the year before, but you were looking at $250 for 100 vs $40 or less for 10 - which, in college student dollars, is a lot. When we had hard drives that barely topped 1 GB, which could be copied in under 17 minutes even on 10 Mbps, there just wasn't a huge incentive to upgrade speed. But once 100 made sense for homes - supporting 802.11g - the price of switches fell rapidly because it was no longer just businesses buying them. And so 1 Gbps fell more quickly, because the background hardware was getting cheaper. My 1998 computer with 100 Mbps and a 6.4 GB drive got used a few times as the piracy data exfiltration machine because it could pull down the 5 GB of stuff we'd accumulated so much faster, then plug it up to the three-apartment network we had set up and let everyone pull it to their own machines on the 10 Mbps we had there. Our outgoing connection was a Linux box on a 56k connection shared among six of us; it's not like 10 Mbps slowed any of that down.
- topspin 3y ago
  100BASE-T marked the transition from Cat 3 to Cat 5, and a lot of sites were actually still making use of coax. That was necessary but was an impediment because it meant a high cost of adoption. This coincided with the fact that, at the time, it was largely unnecessary for the broader market of users: these were the days of IDE/ATA-1 disks, acoustic modems and 300 DPI black and white printers. You watched video with VCR. I recall using a business desktop back in the day with a common IDE disk, and also attached to a NetWare share. The NetWare share was much faster than the local drive although the network was only 10BASE-T. Around that time meetings began: how much was it going to cost to replace all the cable (half of which was still coax) and buy 100BASE-T switches? (Answer: a couple hundred dollars per drop.) That process took two years and another six months to do the work: a quarter of a decade. 1000BASE-T was specified for Cat 5: the floorboards didn't have to be torn up to replace all that cable everyone just paid for. The cost of PHY/SERDES components fell greatly during that time and made 1000BASE-T hardware affordable. Moving from 100BASE-T to 1000BASE-T was, therefore, cheap and easy and took correspondingly less time.
mannyv 3y ago
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.
- tssva 3y ago
  Switches didn’t require one port per host. They required one port per layer-2 network segment. The original switches I deployed had a handful AUI ports to which we attached to 10BASE5 transceivers. Hosts still connected via 10BASE2 or 10BASE5 to the “single wire” of their layer-2 network segment. Over the years the cost of switches lowered to the point where it became cost effective to directly connect hosts and reap the benefits of reducing layer-2 segments to a single host. In between there was also a time where most hosts connected to hubs which then connected to switches.
- nyrikki 3y ago
  When switches first arrived, most of them were unmanaged, or only had basic snmp counters, but they solved the collision problem. I remember my first Internet company, where after getting an ARN for free. Coordinated with uunet over IRC to get them to pull routes from me, turning up our second T1. The second traffic started to flow the collision light on the 24 port 3com fast Ethernet hub went solid. I thought I had routed the Internet over my link.... but no, two T1s through an Alta Vista firewall running on a DecStation was enough to do it with a basic three their web app while backups were running. I had lots of experience with 10base2/5 with more traffic, but the stocastic nature of web traffic was problematic. If you lived through the growth of the Cisco chassis switches, the ASIC improvements that allowed for management was quite obvious. I remember fighting with packet engine engineers, advocating for jumbo frames as default. They wanted to support gig-e hubs, which would have never been useful due to collisions. History proved me right there, nothing simpler than a store and forward bridge made it to mass market for Gig-e
- therealcamino 3y ago
  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.
smackeyacky 3y ago
This was such an interesting time to start working in IT - I worked for one of the BUNCH at the trailing end of the 1980s and we sold other peoples networking hardware as the company had none of it's own. The rapid change from coax ethernet to twisted pair was really something to witness. The original SynOptics LattisNet and StarLAN switches sparked a rapid standardisation effort (incompatible with either). We mostly (tried) to sell 3Com switches and routers as most of our customer base at the time heavily invested in XNS based Lan Manager networks. Within 18 months everything had changed, Cisco suddenly became the hottest networking vendor as all those early networking protocols (XNS, IPX, NETBEUI, DECNet etc) disappeared from local lans and entire companies got obliterated seemingly overnight. I mean, who even remembers Ungermann-Bass? And DEC as referred to in the article started out a major player in the networking space and became an also-ran in no time. All the while the world had gone crazy ripping out coax and madly installing twisted pair. There was a period there where my job involved juggling network drivers in DOS, so that you'd have j-u-s-t enough memory to start Windows. Any customer that needed two network protocols (not uncommon) tore their hair out with memory extenders and carefully crafted config.sys and autoexec.bat files and hoped the BIOS didn't get too radically changed when the next batch of PCs showed up. Horrible, funny in hindsight though.

264 points by hasheddan 3y ago

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). * don’t try this at home or work!

Waterluvian 3y ago
> but unlike the extension cord case, nothing would catch literal fire Somewhere, out there, is a story of an overburdened network setup literally catching fire, and it’s hopefully making its way to us.
- genericone 3y ago
  C'mon HN, I'm counting on you...
- djbusby 3y ago
  I saw one sorta catch fire. But it wasn't over burdened. It was in the kitchen, cause that was also where the utility closet is. and our 100+ year old building has crappy/dirty power, frequent brown-outs. So, a few weeks of splashing coffee, tea and other crap around, and our crap power the thing started humming (60Hz). Then one day POP! Cap blew out and there was a little smoke.
- EricE 3y ago
  Seen more than my fair share of magic smoke from lightning or near lightning strikes. Also fried more than a few ports on devices when passive POE used to be more prevalent :p
jeramey 3y ago
Occasionally people don't understand how to plug extension power cables together, either, especially during times of high stress and low sleep. Once upon a time, when I was in IT support, I got a call from someone in a satellite office across town saying that their computer wouldn't turn on. A new production had begun and everyone was a bit frantic, so this was an urgent request. After asking them to hold the power switch in for a few seconds and try to turn it on again, I asked them to make sure the power cable was secure and that the computer was plugged in. It was, of course, but the computer still wouldn't turn on, so it was time to jump on the bicycle and ride across town with a new power supply in tow, figuring it would be a quick fix. When I arrive, I see that, indeed, the computer was plugged in to a power strip. And that power strip was plugged in to itself. From then on, I always made sure to ask, "Is the computer plugged into the wall?" Saved myself a few bicycle trips that way.
- freedomben 3y ago
  heh, with power strips that have very long cables, I've seen them plugged into themselves a few times as well.
  - Arrath 3y ago
    Like tying a shoelace: the long grey cord goes around the backside of the desk, turns and comes around the front, and back into its own powerstrip. ..Wait why won't it turn on?
- firecall 3y ago
  I was really hoping for some never before known knowledge of how to connect Extension Cables and Power Boards together! But no, turns out someone didnt even manage the basics! LOL There's a reason the IT Crowd have the running joke of 'have you tried turning it off and on again...'! :-)
  - jeramey 3y ago
    In all fairness, the person had obviously been awake for over 24 hours and was on their 1,001st cup of coffee. And since earlier in the summer I had crashed the entire ticket scanner network the night before the opening of the weekend festival we had put on by creating a network loop between a couple of non-spanning-tree-speaking network devices, I didn't feel I was in a place to be snarky about it!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
486sx33 3y ago
Not recommended but these bad boys make a lot of things work, and cause a lot of damage! https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61A5WvzcgsL._AC_UL960_QL65_.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61A5WvzcgsL._AC_UL960_QL...
non-chalad 3y ago
Too late: Tried this at work; Did a marvelous job sharing satellite internet with the whole barracks.
- gumby 3y ago
  Sounds like things worked out, even if all you shared was your porn.
teleforce 3y ago
That's why the new Ethernet protocol 802.11aq is recommending Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) as a robust alternative to Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). Not only it's more robust, but it is more secure with extra resilience against broadcast storm. It also can support multi-cast function more easily and intuitively at data-link layer [1],[2]. Compared to the new SPB, STP looks like an immature hacks and why it took so long to be replaced is beyond me. [1]IEEE 802.1aq: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1aq https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1aq [2] 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging Design and Evolution: The Architect's Perspective: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/book/6381532 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/book/6381532
- throw0101d 3y ago
  > That's why the new Ethernet protocol 802.11aq is recommending Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) as a robust alternative to Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). This is a dead letter standard: most folks who would 'need' SPB are probably using BGP EVPN to reduce the Layer 2 'blast radius'. It should also be noted that the IEEE was dragged kicking and screaming towards SPB: originally TRILL was proposed, but the IEEE rejected it, and so the IETF published: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRILL_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRILL_(computing) IEEE realized their mistake and published SPB, so now there are two L2 standards. Not many folks who either though, with anyone really needing 'large scale' stuff moving towards L3 solutions.
inopinatus 3y ago
> people who didn’t understand networking A couple of decades ago I witnessed a classic demonstration of Weinberg's Corollary¹ when a spanning tree misconfiguration on a freshly-installed BlackDiamond disabled LINX for hours, throwing half of Britain's ISP peering into chaos. The switch in question was evidently cursed: it'd been dropped on my foot earlier that week, thus disabling me for hours, and everyone else involved in that project was dead within two years. __ [1] "an expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy"
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  everyone else involved in that project was dead within two years. That's ... quite a legacy.
- ahazred8ta 3y ago
  The error of a wise man is equal to the combined blunders of a thousand fools.
Aloha 3y ago
STP is basically magic - and being able to reliably optimize it to reduce reconvergence time makes you a magician.
- jbernsteiniv 3y ago
  I feel like STP is basically magic when you first learn it in a course (usually sponsored by Cisco) but the illusion is broken when you learn computer science principles like a graph data structure and how to build an acyclic graph. STP handles this through sending little messages with every node receiving the message appending themselves after whoever sent it. Then a node just checks if it sees itself in the message. If I DO see myself in the chain, I know now I need to not send information to the previous node that sent me the message. The message just needs to be something that'll never succeed but flow through the network. If I have three nodes labeled "A", "B", and "C" then I could send a message intended for "D" (which does not exist in my network). A has a path to B and A has a path to C. B has a path to C and vice versa. Each node can talk to another. A send to B. B checks if its in the chain and if not, it appends itself in the chain. A -> B. B knows it received the message from A so it will ignore this connection and send the message to all of its neighbors. C receives the message from B. C checks if its in the chain and if not, it appends itself in the chain. A > B -> C. C got the message from B so it ignores this path and sends the message to all of its other neighbors (in this case, A). A receives the message and checks if its in the chain (it is). A knows it received the message from C. A now knows that a cycle has been detected, so A disables its connection to C. Congrats! You've designed a tree! Its a graph that contains no cycles. All we had to do was send a message and check if we see ourselves in the chain. If we do, we disable our path to the last node that sent us a message. Of course STP gets more complicated from here as we factor in path costs as weights to measure the decision to axe a connection. Maybe A -> B is a 1G connection and A -> C is a 10G connection, in this case A may disable the path to B. I do agree that reducing reconvergence time is magic. I don't understand that one.
BuildTheRobots 3y ago
> 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.

spintin 3y ago

[flagged]

eej71 3y ago
I think the great architectural challenge would be - how does one add that byte to the IP header in a non-breaking way?
- themerone 3y ago
  There's a surprising number of people who think you could magically expand the IPv4 address space in a backwards compatible manner.
  - eej71 3y ago
    It would be great if its true! Perhaps its really there and we're all just blind to it? Unlikely, but I'm willing to be surprised.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Unfortunately none of those people have explained how it could be done in enough detail that I could try it. Most walk away when pressed but a few press on telling me it is easy so shut up and do it .
      - mixmastamyk 3y ago
        Similar to how it has been done with phone numbers. I saw this done in Brazil for example. You add a digit to the front and put all existing address on 0.*. Short number dials are assumed to be 0.*. Update OS and hardware. Then you allocate across the new digit much later as time goes on. The thing with phone infrastructure though is that it is centralized. So may happen in a reasonably coordinated rollout. Global internet is a lot more distributed so it would take a very long time. The open question is, would it take longer than IP6 has? Maybe not. Part of the reason I didn't care to use it early was because of the long addresses. If we could get a five byte address written in hex it would be somewhat user friendly.

beachy 3y ago

> Mark’s idea didn’t replace Ethernet—and that was its brilliance. By allowing store-and-forward switching between existing CSMA/CD coax-based Ethernets, bridges allowed easy upgrades of existing LANs. This reminds me of John Carmack's philosophy of great things coming from thinking locally and taking small steps. > Carmack subscribes to the philosophy that small, incremental steps are the fastest route to meaningful and disruptive innovation. He compares this approach to the "magic of gradient descent" where small steps using local information result in the best outcomes. According to Carmack, this principle is proven by his own experience, and he has observed this in many of the smartest people in the world. He states, "Little tiny steps using local information winds up leading to all the best answers."

Solvency 3y ago
That last paragraph is literally the same basic sentence about "little steps" written three times in slightly different ways. Did you get this quote from an AI written SEOspam site?
- beachy 3y ago
  Ha ha, it came from Wikipedia so possibly.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - itemize 3y ago
    As a barely relevant point, Using google, I can't find references to the quote (or John Carmack) by searching 'Little tiny steps using local information winds up leading to all the best answers'. Other search engines seems to do a bit better on retrieving the Wiki article. What gives, is google really becoming worse?
    - Solvency 3y ago
      It's been at its worst for like 6 years.

inopinatus 3y ago

This is all very well but DEC's greatest contribution to my own networking happiness was perhaps the quad-port Tulip/21143 cards that were my go-to for building reliable FreeBSD-based white-box routers back in the day

panick21_ 3y ago

I always wondered why it took so long to go from 10 Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s. For sure in that time they invented things like Ethernet Switching. But still, it seems like that standard took forever to move on. And then once it did it went from 100Mbit/s to 1000Mbit/s per second pretty damn fast.

devilbunny 3y ago
10 Mbps was fine for, frankly, just about anything under 100 MB. And since 100 Mbps hubs were rare beasts, most being switches, they stayed a lot more expensive for a long time. Hell, my first home network was 10 Mbps on thinnet because it was so much cheaper than a 10 Mbps hub, and that was ca. 1997. I'd had 100 Mbps available in the dorms the year before, but you were looking at $250 for 100 vs $40 or less for 10 - which, in college student dollars, is a lot. When we had hard drives that barely topped 1 GB, which could be copied in under 17 minutes even on 10 Mbps, there just wasn't a huge incentive to upgrade speed. But once 100 made sense for homes - supporting 802.11g - the price of switches fell rapidly because it was no longer just businesses buying them. And so 1 Gbps fell more quickly, because the background hardware was getting cheaper. My 1998 computer with 100 Mbps and a 6.4 GB drive got used a few times as the piracy data exfiltration machine because it could pull down the 5 GB of stuff we'd accumulated so much faster, then plug it up to the three-apartment network we had set up and let everyone pull it to their own machines on the 10 Mbps we had there. Our outgoing connection was a Linux box on a 56k connection shared among six of us; it's not like 10 Mbps slowed any of that down.
topspin 3y ago
100BASE-T marked the transition from Cat 3 to Cat 5, and a lot of sites were actually still making use of coax. That was necessary but was an impediment because it meant a high cost of adoption. This coincided with the fact that, at the time, it was largely unnecessary for the broader market of users: these were the days of IDE/ATA-1 disks, acoustic modems and 300 DPI black and white printers. You watched video with VCR. I recall using a business desktop back in the day with a common IDE disk, and also attached to a NetWare share. The NetWare share was much faster than the local drive although the network was only 10BASE-T. Around that time meetings began: how much was it going to cost to replace all the cable (half of which was still coax) and buy 100BASE-T switches? (Answer: a couple hundred dollars per drop.) That process took two years and another six months to do the work: a quarter of a decade. 1000BASE-T was specified for Cat 5: the floorboards didn't have to be torn up to replace all that cable everyone just paid for. The cost of PHY/SERDES components fell greatly during that time and made 1000BASE-T hardware affordable. Moving from 100BASE-T to 1000BASE-T was, therefore, cheap and easy and took correspondingly less time.

mannyv 3y ago

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.

tssva 3y ago
Switches didn’t require one port per host. They required one port per layer-2 network segment. The original switches I deployed had a handful AUI ports to which we attached to 10BASE5 transceivers. Hosts still connected via 10BASE2 or 10BASE5 to the “single wire” of their layer-2 network segment. Over the years the cost of switches lowered to the point where it became cost effective to directly connect hosts and reap the benefits of reducing layer-2 segments to a single host. In between there was also a time where most hosts connected to hubs which then connected to switches.
nyrikki 3y ago
When switches first arrived, most of them were unmanaged, or only had basic snmp counters, but they solved the collision problem. I remember my first Internet company, where after getting an ARN for free. Coordinated with uunet over IRC to get them to pull routes from me, turning up our second T1. The second traffic started to flow the collision light on the 24 port 3com fast Ethernet hub went solid. I thought I had routed the Internet over my link.... but no, two T1s through an Alta Vista firewall running on a DecStation was enough to do it with a basic three their web app while backups were running. I had lots of experience with 10base2/5 with more traffic, but the stocastic nature of web traffic was problematic. If you lived through the growth of the Cisco chassis switches, the ASIC improvements that allowed for management was quite obvious. I remember fighting with packet engine engineers, advocating for jumbo frames as default. They wanted to support gig-e hubs, which would have never been useful due to collisions. History proved me right there, nothing simpler than a store and forward bridge made it to mass market for Gig-e
therealcamino 3y ago
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.

smackeyacky 3y ago

This was such an interesting time to start working in IT - I worked for one of the BUNCH at the trailing end of the 1980s and we sold other peoples networking hardware as the company had none of it's own. The rapid change from coax ethernet to twisted pair was really something to witness. The original SynOptics LattisNet and StarLAN switches sparked a rapid standardisation effort (incompatible with either). We mostly (tried) to sell 3Com switches and routers as most of our customer base at the time heavily invested in XNS based Lan Manager networks. Within 18 months everything had changed, Cisco suddenly became the hottest networking vendor as all those early networking protocols (XNS, IPX, NETBEUI, DECNet etc) disappeared from local lans and entire companies got obliterated seemingly overnight. I mean, who even remembers Ungermann-Bass? And DEC as referred to in the article started out a major player in the networking space and became an also-ran in no time. All the while the world had gone crazy ripping out coax and madly installing twisted pair. There was a period there where my job involved juggling network drivers in DOS, so that you'd have j-u-s-t enough memory to start Windows. Any customer that needed two network protocols (not uncommon) tore their hair out with memory extenders and carefully crafted config.sys and autoexec.bat files and hoped the BIOS didn't get too radically changed when the next batch of PCs showed up. Horrible, funny in hindsight though.