En teknik som kanska haft det allra största inflytandet på datanätens utveckling (tilsammans med TCP/IP - alltså Internet) har fyllt 35 år den 22 maj i år. Men det Ethernet som vi nu har liknar inte den första versionen så väldigt mycket.
http://fibresystems.org/blog/2008/05/happy_birthda y_ethernet.html"Ethernet is 35 years old today, according to inventor Bob Metcalfe. "Ethernet's birthday is on May 22nd of this year, and I'm hoping my wife will go out to dinner with me that evening," he told the assembled audience at the OFC/NFOEC show back in February. (And yes, I've been saving up this little factoid ever since).
Ethernet's come a long way since 1973 when it ran at 2.4 Mbit/s, which was a pretty zippy speed for the time. "Imagine my delight at conferences like this where the discussion was whether 300 baud was enough," Metcalfe recalled. "At 600 baud the characters raced past on the screen so fast you couldn't read them anyway, so why would you need a 600 baud modem?"
In 1978 Metcalfe worked on a fibre-optic version of Ethernet, which ran at 150 Mbit/s. "Ironically in 1978 even though we were running at 150Mbit/s with this optical fibre system, the core circuits of the network were running at 50 kbit/s, 3000 times slower," he said. "Needless to say this fibre-optic Ethernet did not take off in 1978, in fact it would be 20 more years before Ethernet went optical again."
The Ethernet we have today has changed almost out of all recognition from the Ethernet of 35 years ago. For starters it's broken out of the LAN and into the wide area network. What's more it has to handle time-sensitive video and voice traffic, something that was never imagined at the start. And of course it's a lot faster. The next hike in speed takes us to 100 Gbit/s, with standards likely to be finalized later this year by the IEEE Higher Speed Study Group. I wonder what Ethernet will look like in another 35 years... because I'd like to bet it will still be with us in one shape or another."
