They used the date of creation of the 10 Mb/s DIX paper (published in ACM in 1981) for the anniversary, but there was an earlier 1976 ACM paper:<p>* <a href="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1920/CompNet/files/p395-metcalfe.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1920/CompNet/files/p395-me...</a><p>* <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/360248.360253" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/360248.360253</a><p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet#History" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet#History</a>
In general, ethernet doesn't do collision detect now - practically every wired ethernet goes from a machine to a switch on a full duplex link, with the switch having buffers to cope with collisions - worst case the second packet is discarded, no need to back off at a random interval.<p>Does wireless ethernet have CSMA/CD, or is it some better time based protocol?
> The original implementation used coaxial cable, as it was widely available for TV sets, to be able to act as the physical layer of the network – although with coaxial/10Base2 networks, the end of the co-axial cable run required the use of a terminator to avoid signal reflection.<p>Reminds me of the early 90s when I convinced our company to try LANtastic instead of the bulky IBM Token Ring network we had at the time. Tiny coax cables with BNC connectors and terminators, and no central server or MAU. Each workstation was its own "server" and we could finally use our IBM AT for actual work instead of having its RAM stuffed full with IBM network management software! Hell of a lot cheaper too!
Robert Metcalfe gave a great interview with Tim Ferriss not long ago. He has some sharp insights and stories to tell.<p><a href="https://tim.blog/2018/02/14/bob-metcalfe/" rel="nofollow">https://tim.blog/2018/02/14/bob-metcalfe/</a>
Ethernet has had such a long run. Now at 200 gigabits per second: <a href="https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Broadcom-bnxt_en-200G-Linux" rel="nofollow">https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Broadcom...</a>
If I had a time machine, rather than killing Hitler, I'd go back and convince them to make the ethernet header 16 bytes rather than 14 in order to keep things nicely aligned.<p>A 14 byte header causes lots of alignment issues.. I first encountered this on DEC Alpha, pre-byte/word extensions. When using network drivers not designed for alpha, the kernel would take an alignment fault when accessing 4-byte IP addresses which were aligned on a 2 byte boundary.
Cool. It’s neat that some ideas from the original Ethernet paper are still used today. I wonder how it’ll be 100 years from now —- will we still use MAC addresses?