> Mark’s idea didn’t replace Ethernet—and that was its brilliance. By allowing store-and-forward switching between existing CSMA/CD coax-based Ethernets, bridges allowed easy upgrades of existing LANs.<p>This reminds me of John Carmack's philosophy of great things coming from thinking locally and taking small steps.<p>> Carmack subscribes to the philosophy that small, incremental steps are the fastest route to meaningful and disruptive innovation. He compares this approach to the "magic of gradient descent" where small steps using local information result in the best outcomes. According to Carmack, this principle is proven by his own experience, and he has observed this in many of the smartest people in the world. He states, "Little tiny steps using local information winds up leading to all the best answers."
What a great story. The spanning tree algo is under appreciated: this allowed people who didn’t understand networking to plug networks together the way you would plug extension power cables together,* making networking simple ( or alternatively insanely broken, when people had 400 computers on a single LAN with a rat’s nest of bridges and hubs…but unlike the extension cord case, nothing would catch literal fire).<p>* don’t try this at home or work!
This is all very well but DEC's greatest contribution to my own networking happiness was perhaps the quad-port Tulip/21143 cards that were my go-to for building reliable FreeBSD-based white-box routers back in the day
I always wondered why it took so long to go from 10 Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s. For sure in that time they invented things like Ethernet Switching. But still, it seems like that standard took forever to move on. And then once it did it went from 100Mbit/s to 1000Mbit/s per second pretty damn fast.
One side effect of the network switch was that you needed to buy switches. With the old way everyone could be on one wire. With the new way you needed one port per host.<p>Switches also allowed for centralized management.<p>Note that cable works on what essentially is token ring, at least conceptually; channel 0 (i believe, it's been a while) is the heartbeat.
This was such an interesting time to start working in IT - I worked for one of the BUNCH at the trailing end of the 1980s and we sold other peoples networking hardware as the company had none of it's own.<p>The rapid change from coax ethernet to twisted pair was really something to witness. The original SynOptics LattisNet and StarLAN switches sparked a rapid standardisation effort (incompatible with either). We mostly (tried) to sell 3Com switches and routers as most of our customer base at the time heavily invested in XNS based Lan Manager networks. Within 18 months everything had changed, Cisco suddenly became the hottest networking vendor as all those early networking protocols (XNS, IPX, NETBEUI, DECNet etc) disappeared from local lans and entire companies got obliterated seemingly overnight.<p>I mean, who even remembers Ungermann-Bass? And DEC as referred to in the article started out a major player in the networking space and became an also-ran in no time. All the while the world had gone crazy ripping out coax and madly installing twisted pair.<p>There was a period there where my job involved juggling network drivers in DOS, so that you'd have j-u-s-t enough memory to start Windows. Any customer that needed two network protocols (not uncommon) tore their hair out with memory extenders and carefully crafted config.sys and autoexec.bat files and hoped the BIOS didn't get too radically changed when the next batch of PCs showed up. Horrible, funny in hindsight though.