Stephen Lawson

(IDG News Service) — At a recent event celebrating its 30th birthday, the trailblazers of Ethernet marveled at its evolution from a cable between copiers that ran a bit faster than today's home broadband services to the key technology in huge enterprise networks and even carrier data services. A recurring refrain was that Ethernet today is nothing like what they invented. Bob Metcalfe, who as a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) wrote a memo describing Ethernet on May 22, 1973, recalled realizing a few years later that the fledgling technology was outgrowing its origins at the sleek lab nestled amid rolling hills in Palo Alto, California. "I remember thinking in 1982, 'There are people buying Ethernet I have never met,' " Metcalfe told an audience of networking pioneers and reporters at PARC last week. From its first incarnation as a shared pac... (more)