[TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

[jsteve@superglobalmegacorp.com (Jason Stevens)]

Ethernet wasn't really usable until switching...  And getting off of the thicknet.

That said, AT&T had their starlan thing that I've had the misfortune of using.  At least the PC had NDIS2 drivers that Windows 95 could use.

And of course there was FDDI that was going to take over the LAN, and ATM over the high speed WAN, replacing all the old leased lines T1/E1/J1's.

The big thing is that Ethernet doesn't require royalties, and as I mentioned switching greatly reduced the issues with collisions making them point to point on a switch, along with full duplex operation.  As soon as Ethernet hit 10gig for a fraction of the cost of OC-128 it was over for ATM.

Now we just do mpls and qinq.  Can't say I'll miss v35 connectors.

On March 25, 2017 12:52:26 PM GMT+08:00, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
>
>I wasn't very keyed into the networking world at Bell Labs, but I do
>know there was a lot of suspicion about Ethernet in the Unix group. 
>The
>key problem from BTL's point of view, and this problem is still with us
>today, is that you could not guarantee a minimum bandwidth of
>connectivity.  At the speeds things were running at that time, this
>would have made Ethernet impossible for voice, not to mention video.
>
>Sandy Fraser's Datakit, which was a time division switch I think, would
>give you a reliable end-to-end connection (although when you got to the
>other end, it could still bog down in the other computer).  It was an
>extremely reliable and easy-to-use system.   Exactly who did what is
>murky to me, but I seem to recall that Peter Weinberger did something
>much akin to NFS (I think it eventually morphed into RFS).  I remember
>Bill Joy visiting the Unix group and seeing it and being very excited.
>Story is that he went back to Sun/(Stanford?) and implemented NFS and
>got it to market at least two years before than.  Also, I think Greg
>Chesson implemented something like ssh so you could run processes on
>remote machines.
>
>A lot of this work happened for (or was influenced by) the Blit
>terminal, where you could download a 68000 program from the PDP-11 and
>run it on the terminal with communications between the terminal and the
>application on the PDP-11.  There were some very neat demos, and a few
>real tools, but it was hard to program and debug.   If I have a regret
>about Unix, I'm sorry that this particular line wasn't pushed harder,
>since it's now the world we live in (in spades!) and I would have liked
>to see what those minds came up with to make this easier...
>
>Steve
>
>
>
>
>On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 4:56 PM Josh Good < pepe at naleco.com
><mailto:pepe at naleco.com> > wrote:
>
>
>
>
>Which brings up a question I have: why didn't UNIX implement ethernet
>network interfaces as file names in the filesystem? Was that "novelty"
>a
>BDS development straying away from AT&T UNIX?

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170325/d5ed58ee/attachment-0001.html>