Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!kwe
From: kwe@bu-cs.BU.EDU (kwe@bu-it.bu.edu (Kent W. England))
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: Token Ring vs. Ethernet
Message-ID: <27089@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 7 Jan 89 22:00:57 GMT
References: <5786@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <18809@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: kwe@buit13.bu.edu (Kent England)
Followup-To: comp.dcom.lans
Organization: Boston U. Information Technology
Lines: 53

In article <18809@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> glass@tehran.berkeley.edu
 (Brett Glass) writes:
>
>The use of a "foreign" internetworking protocol such as TCP/IP in a
>benchmark will favor Ethernet because it will negate the value of many
>of the Token Ring's unique features. (The Token Ring may still prevail,
>however, depending on how you've set up your benchmurk... er, mark.)
>

You should know that one of the most fundamental aspects of the design
of TCP/IP and any other good internetworking protocol is that the
protocol work well independently of the medium.  If you tell me that
someone has developed a super-duper protocol suite tailored to Token
Ring (or Ethernet for that matter) that really screams compared to
TCP/IP, I would say that rates one big yawn.  I am simply not
interested in "local area" protocols.  I need internetworking
protocols. 

There is no such thing as TCP/IP having a favored medium.  As Van J,
Dave Borman from Cray, and Phil Karn from Bellcore and amateur packet
radio fame, among others, have proven, TCP/IP runs over *anything* from
tin cans and string to Cray channels, including Ethernet.  And it now
works "well".

Anyone in the software development business should feel about the same
way.  It gets tedious writing device drivers ad nauseum.  How much
worse would it be to write protocol stacks for each medium ad nauseum.

You haven't convinced me that Token Ring has anything really wiz-bang
to offer that can't be duplicated in TCP/IP.

DEC hasn't convinced me that I should love LAT and their other local
area protocols.

IEEE hasn't convinced anyone to use 802 LLC 2.  (almost no one)

I simply do not rate LAN performance by the presence or absence of
acknowledgements or contention.  I think raw speed, cabling, topology,
fault-tolerance, etc are much better ways to rate LAN technology.

I have Ethernet networks where no other technology will do, since all
the vendors support it and the cost of the computer hardware justifies
the Ethernet.

I have Pronet-80 for a backbone.  Ethernet wouldn't do, simply because
of bandwidth.

I have LocalTalk because of Apple, but I wish I had a nice LocalTalk X
terminal since that would be very cost-effective.

I would like to run TCP/IP on all these media.  Guess what?  I can.

	Kent England, Boston University