3 ms·
In the very beginning of ethernet there were no switches - you just had a bunch of transceivers connected to a length of coax cable. Every NIC on the wire saw
by Polizeiposaune 1y ago
In the very beginning of ethernet there were no switches - you just had a bunch of transceivers connected to a length of coax cable.
Every NIC on the wire saw every packet; the destination mac address indicated whether the packet was interesting enough to each node to be worth putting a copy in host memory and bothering the CPU to look at.
- kstrauser 1y agoFor the young’uns amongst us: switches use to be an expensive luxury. Most small LANs used cheap hubs at the edges, where every inbound Ethernet frame was sprayed out to all the other ports. They commonly had “collision” lights, and they used ‘em.
- eszed 1y agoYup. Was going to say the same thing. I remember my first encounter with a switched network bent my brain. What, I have to give everything an address? Where'd this 192.168 come from? Networking used to be so easy! Anyway, we all learned and adapted.