IP: a personal comment correcting some history WORTH READING History of 8008?

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

I just have to make some comments. We, at UC Irvine , as part of the DCS
project that I was PI of , had a 2.5 megabit token ring working in the mid
70's . This ring later became the IBM Token Ring after some interesting
parts had been removed. Bob Metcalfe has said that he did the Ethernet cause
we did the token ring.

For the additional record, the DCS was a fully distributed system operating
over a LAN offering transparent process migration, load sharing, contract
resource control (auctioning) and utilizing the new minicomputers that were
just appearing. Besides being the first I know of that actually did
distributed computing, it ran in metal rather than in conference proceedings
and was fault tolerant and smoothly adapted to failures.

Dave


------ Forwarded Message
From: Russell Nelson <nelson@crynwr.com>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2002 21:52:24 -0400 (EDT)
To: gep2@terabites.com
Cc: dave@farber.net
Subject: Re: IP: more on  also  WORTH READING History of 8008?

 > or that Robert Metcalfe was the father of local area networking
 > (!!!  his clumsy two-megabit, thick-wire Ethernet was hopelessly
 > impractical, and never would have been widely commercially
 > successful)

Ethernet I was three-megabit.  Datapoint's ARCNet was 2.5-megabit.  It
was originally coax, but later implementations of its transceiver
worked over a single CAT-3 twisted pair (aka phone wire).  ARCNet was
*sweet*.  I tried to get Clarkson University to let me wire one
dormitory using these twisted-pair ARCNet boards, but Clarkson's "We
Shall Take no Risk Before Its time" IT management saw no applications
for dormitory networking in 1988.  Couldn't even get permission to do a
technology demo of wiring one room.

-- 
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------ End of Forwarded Message

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