The first fifty years of Ethernet
Ethernet is now the ubiquitous fixed Local Area Network technology. This technology was invented by Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs at the Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to connect the ALTO workstations and the first laser printers. In 2021, Bob Metcalfe shared a dropbox with several historical documents:
- the seminal paper Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks published in Communications of the ACM
- the first internal Memo on Ethernet that was published on May 22th, 1973, exactly fifty years ago
- the first Ethernet “standard” or the Blue book published by intel, Digital and Xeorx on September 30th, 1980
- a phot of the original Ethernet inventors
Earlier this year Bob Metcalfe received the ACM Turing award for the invention of Ethernet. He gave a very interesting keynote at the web conference.
In addition to these historical resources, the IEEE 802 working group that manages the standardisation of all LAN technologies shared two interesting posts:
- A picture of the cake to celebrate Ethernet’s birthday
- A timeline of the history of Ethernet
RIPE Labs also published a blog post that summarises the evolution of the Ethernet from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and beyond.
Communications of the ACM published two interviews with Bob Metcalfe:
This blog post was written to encourage the students who learned networking by reading the Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols, and Practice ebook to stay up to date and expand their knowledge of the networking technolgy.