Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Ethernet Factoid
Message-ID: <1990Apr10.195000.7522@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <76700190@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 90 19:50:00 GMT

In article <76700190@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>He complained that DEC was unreasonable in demanding 10Mb/sec
>performance, when Xerox's 3Mb/sec performance would have been
>perfectly adequate.
>
>Who was right?  Today, PC's (Compaq systempro) are hitting the 10Mb/s
>wall...

Suns have been able to drive an Ethernet pretty much flat-out for years
now.  However, they seldom do it for very long in practice.

It's kind of hard to say who was right.  Faster is better, other things
being equal... but they aren't equal.  The 10Mb/s rate was just fast
enough to drastically boost the price of an Ethernet interface compared
to the old 3Mb/s ones.  If the standard had gone with 3Mb/s, we might
(repeat, might) by now have somewhat slower Ethernets so widespread that
RS232 could be dying out.  Certainly local networks would have gotten
started earlier and be far more widespread, given the lower costs.
Most of Ethernet's current competitors would have been stillborn, with
all that means in interoperability and standardization.  I tend to
suspect it would have been worth it.

>What is the remaining lifetime of 10Mb/s ethernet?

That's like asking what's the remaining lifetime of RS232.  Ethernet
may not be the front-line networking for the high-priced hardware for
too much longer, but it will be the standard for non-performance-critical
local networking for a long, long time.  It's too universal to die any
time soon.
-- 
With features like this,      |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
who needs bugs?               | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu