From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: rochkind@basepath.com (Marc Rochkind) Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2017 09:52:27 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 14, Issue 63 In-Reply-To: <20170116164421.GJ6647@mcvoy.com> References: <201701161600.v0GG00XA080461@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20170116164421.GJ6647@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: If you think AT&T looked askance at cheap networking, you can imagine what they thought of cheap telephones. When I interviewed in early 1970 at Columbus, I recall one of the engineers joking that you'd have to buy one of those "imitation" phones at a discount store, as if that vision was enough to kill off the idea. On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 9:44 AM, Larry McVoy wrote: > On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 11:00:00AM -0500, Doug McIlroy wrote: > > The highest levels of AT&T were happy to carry digital data, but > > did not see digital as significant business. Even though digital T1 > > was the backbone of long-distance transmission, it was IBM, not > > AT&T, that offered direct digital interfaces to T1 in the 60s. > > AT&T seemed pretty clueless about networking. I gave a short talk at Hot > Interconnects in the heyday of ATM. Paul Borrill got me a speaking spot, > I wasn't well known person but inside of Sun I had been railing against > ATM and pushing for 100Mbit ethernet and Paul decided to see what the > rest of the world thought. > > 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 held up the two cards, disclosed the cost, and said "this ATM card is > always going to be expensive but the ethernet card is gonna be $10 in > a year or two. Why? Volume. Every computer has ethernet, it's gonna > do nothing but get cheaper. And you're gonna see ethernet over fiber, > long haul, you're going to see 100 Mbit, gigabit ethernet, and it's > going to be cheap. ATM is going nowhere." > > There was a shocked silence. Weirdest talk ever, the room just went > silent for what seemed forever. Then someone, I'm sure it was an engineer > who had been forced to work on ATM, started clapping. Just one guy. > And then the whole room joined in. > > I took the silence as "yeah, but my boss says I have to" and the clapping > as "we agree". > > At the time AT&T was the biggest pusher of ATM. Telephone switches were > big and expensive and it was clear, to me at least, that AT&T looked at > all those cheap ethernet switches and said "yeah, let's get the industry > working on phone switching and we'll get cheap switches too". Nice idea, > didn't work out. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: