Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> The gist of my talk was that ATM was a joke.  I had an ATM card (on loan
> from Sun Networking), I think it was 155 Mbit card.  I also had an 
> ethernet card that I had bought at Fry's on my way to the talk.
> The ATM card cost $4000.  The ethernet card cost $49 IIRC.
>
> The point I was making was that ATM was doomed.  This was at the time in
> history when every company was making long bets on ATM, they all thought
> it was the future; well, all meaning the execs had been convinced.

I cannot speak for the US, but ATM was rather popular in the European 
telecommunication in the mid 1990s.

I was e.g. in a EU research project, where I wrote IP-Multicast enhancements 
for the FORE ATM driver to support video multicast. From what I know, there may
still have been ATM in the core network of German Telekom when they started 
their IP-TV offer that is based on IP-multicast.

So people tried to work around the problems in ATM for a while until ATM was 
given up.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/