20 Jan
2012
20 Jan
'12
1:58 p.m.
On 1/20/12 1:37 PM, "Eric Smith" <eric at brouhaha.com> wrote:
Keith Monahan wrote:
Keep in mind that the original Ethernet, on the Xerox Alto, was driven
directly by the microcode engine. Ethernet was one of several
cooperatively multitasked 'tasks' in the microcode, others including disk
access, drawing the screen and refreshing dynamic RAM. I'm convinced it
was 3Mb/s because that was the fastest they felt could be supported
without bringing everything else to a crawl. Considering later standards
such as ARCnet (at 2.5Mb/s), it's my opinion they were wild optimists.
:-) -- Ian
I'm not sure if I ever even heard a passing
comment about 3mbps --- Must
have been fairly unpopular(by then) for me not to run into it at least
once. This was 15+ years ago.....
15 years ago is *modern* times as the history of Ethernet goes. 3Mbps
well on its way out 10 years before that.
Note that 3Mbps Ethernet was only a defacto standard. The first industry
standard was for 10Mbps, adopted in 1980, and the IEEE standard wasn't
published until 1985.