Evolution of Ethernet

In the early 1970s, ARPANET continued to be incrementally developed and, by 1973, evolved to include 30 institutions in its network. That same year, e-mail was developed to run over the existing ARPANET system by Ray Tomlison of BBN (the same company that initially developed IMP). Also in the early 1970s, application protocols such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Telnet, and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) were being developed and tested by being run over ARPANET.

These developments (in conjunction with the growth of networks and their interconnectivity) began to ignite the utilization of ARPANET by academic, military, government, and private institutions. The explosive growth of a number of networks was a repeat of the problem of the last decade connecting nodes together within one network. Both Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf worked on developing a common protocol to allow differing networks to communicate with each other. The result of their successful collaboration in 1973 was TCP/IP. Like so many of the technologies of that time (Unix and the C programming language just happen to come to mind), we still use it today bigger, better, and stronger than ever.

Ethernet was also invented and tested in this same time period by Robert Metcalfe and his assistant David Boggs, although it was not officially designated as such in the 1980 codification of IEEE 802.3. There were also subsequent standards to emerge from IEEE in response to the phenomenal growth of wireless technology. Wireless Ethernet specifications are in 802.11b and 802.11g. Ethernet is a local area network (LAN) technology that allows communication between devices such as printers, scanners, and computers on a shared physical network. A LAN is a small network that could be used in one building, one department or section, or one lab. Basically, when the devices need to communicate with each other, they encapsulate their data in an Ethernet frame and send their data down the shared wires to the destination.

The Ethernet frame has standardized fields for addressing, holding data, and checking to see that the data arrived safely at its destination. If it does not arrive safely, the data is usually resent, depending on the transmission protocol used. If a computer needs to send data to another device on another LAN, it sends its data packet to the switch or router attached to that local LAN, and the LAN router or switch forwards the data across the Internet to the device on the other network.

Although when Ethernet was first devised in the mid-1970s when the physical media being used was coaxial cable running over what was called a bus topology, Ethernet has proved enduring and astoundingly flexible as it has evolved to run over twisted-pair cabling at speeds of 10 Megabits per second (Mbps), 100 Mbps, 1 gigabit, and even 10 gigabits. It runs at the same range of speeds today over fiber, and the growing wireless (mobile and fixed) network infrastructures with remarkably little change in its underlying encapsulation and delivery structure. Again, the structure of this frame has hardly changed since 1980, although the physical media that uses it (the cabling, the switches, repeaters, routers, and bridges) have undergone several significant evolutions. Like so much out of the 1980s, the creators of the protocols and the languages built far better products than those invented today. Much of what they have created (such as Ethernet) has proved fantastically scalable and portable.

Bytes and bits

If you ever wondered why the basic unit of datum representation (a byte) is 8 binary digits (bits) long, you may credit IBM. The 1964 introduction of its phenomenally successful 360 series of machines with complementary operating system wiped out the competing computers, which used 6-bit and 12-bit systems on their machines. The IBM 360 ran on an 8-bit system. Hence, the 8-bit byte became the standard. A byte is also sometimes referred to as a word, or octet , and a 4-bit byte is called a nibble.

Public emergence of the Internet

Time magazine was on target when it selected ‘‘the computer’’ as ‘‘Man of the Year’’ during the 1980s, but the magazine had no idea of the immensity of the transformation in our lives that the decade brought about. From the mid-1980s onward, huge numbers of entrepreneurs jumped into the extraordinary ocean of opportunity that was emerging from the cloistered halls of research. Some were like fireflies that barely lasted the decade, offering impossible Star Trek solutions to worldly workaday problems of office drudgery and persistently unfulfilled promises of a technological utopia. But there also arose the enduring giants of our age (such as Apple, Compaq, IBM, Gateway, TI, Microsoft, Intel, and AMD) from this siren dawn of the Internet Era, as if Aphrodite had risen again from the mists of the sea.

The 1980s witnessed the remarkable growth and acceptance of these new technologies in the public and commercial markets, as the underlying technologies continued to evolve and the backbone infrastructure was developed, funded, and put into place. A lot of the funding was initially provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to set up and link networks for a university system called CSNET. NASA became involved, and soon there was a whole host of government entities funding the growth. Along with government participation, IBM introduced the personal computer (PC) in 1981 (with DOS) and Adam Osborne released the first portable computer (a 24-pound behemoth). As mentioned, NCP was replaced by TCP/IP in 1983 as the protocol for communication between networks across the Internet, and was incorporated into newer machines. Bill Joy added TCP/IP to his Unix package and soon founded Sun Microsystems. Newcomers to the world of business began to emerge. Novell got its start. Apple Computer released its IIE then the big one, the Mac. After IBM PCs were released, IBM clones began to emerge. Compaq developed a computer and began to rival IBM. CPM, developed by Digital Research as an operating system, was briefly popular, but then was overtaken in the market when PC clones were built with MS-DOS.

Telecommunications giant AT&T (once derisively referred to in that decade as ‘‘All Talk and no Tech’’) began to sense an opportunity and moved in response to the onset of rivals. MCI is one of many telecommunications firms that got its start in the 1980s. Bill English of Xerox’s famous Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) invented the trackball mouse in 1981 and shipped it with Xerox’s Star computer. Mice are the predominate interface with computers to this day. Try to imagine the growth of the computer industry (and GUIs) if everything were keyboard-only. Where would the gaming industry be?

Because the Internet was growing so rapidly, the Domain Name System (DNS) was developed to keep clear nodes and their addresses. It has the now-familiar classifications of .com, .net, .org, .gov, and .edu. A generic International suffix (.int) was rejected in favor of two-letter country names. A way to manage the unwieldy Internet was developed, SMTP, as another interim solution. In 1984, Orwellian though it might have been, Congress provided funding through the NSF to establish regional supercomputing centers throughout the nation with open access to all universities via the Internet. These backbones quickly progressed from T-1 with a transmission capacity of 1.544 Mbps to T-3 pipes with the capacity of 28 T-1 lines (48Mbps).

By the end of 1985, there were 2,000 networks. By the end of 1987, there were nearly 30,000, and almost 10,000 were connected to the Internet. To address the connectivity issues of these networks, yet another host of companies emerged (Synoptics, Banyan, Cabletron, Wellfleet, and Cisco) to service an industry that did not exist a few years earlier. Usenet emerged as a popular alternative to what was being offered, and bulletin board systems (BBS) enjoyed their brief day in the sun (arguably to emerge most recently in the guise of blogs). By 1988, the first known virus, the Morris worm, led to the creation of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), and with it, yet a new genus of Internet businesses to fight viruses branched out from the Internet tree of life.

By the end of the 1980s, more than 50 other nations had become associated with the Internet, thus changing it from a national to an international revolution.