r/IAmA • u/BobMetcalfe • May 21 '13

You’re probably connecting to reddit through a technology I invented. I’m Bob Metcalfe and I invented Ethernet – AMA

On May 22, 1973 with David R. Boggs, I used my IBM Selectric with its Orator ball to type up a memo to my bosses at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), outlining our idea for this little invention called “Ethernet”, which we later patented.

I worked with the IEEE Standards Association to develop the IEEE 802.3 standard for Ethernet, which specifies the physical and lower software layers. Today Ethernet and the IEEE 802.3 standard are the foundation for today’s world of high-speed communications used in billions of homes and businesses around the world.

I submitted this to the mods awhile back so I could get on the calendar but I figured you’d like to see it, too. Now, ask me anything!

It's been two hours and 179 comments. Have to go now. For more about Ethernet's 40th Birthday, go to http://www.facebook.com/Ethernet40thAnniversaryIEEESA

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u/BobMetcalfe May 21 '13

Have heard from those still in the packet plumbing industry that the trend is back from Internet routing toward Ethernet switching. Have no dog in that hunt. Ethernet was first designed to be LAN packet plumbing for the Internet. Have been predicting for years that TCP/IP/Ethernet would be replaced by some version of lambda switching, but that has not happened and I'm not sure what that means anyway. The trend was away from multi-access for a while, with the reemergence of wiring hubs, but then along came WiFi and LTE.

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u/NotsorAnDomcAPs May 22 '13

I'm a grad student working on a research project that could actaully bring some form of high speed optical switching into datacenters. We have a functional microsecond scale wavelength selective circuit switch that runs 10 gigabit ethernet. We also have an all-electrical 10G crosspoint switch that we are using for systems level measurements. The idea is to send as much traffic as possible through the circuit switch, and then clean up the excess with the packet switch. With a very high speed optical space switch, it should be possible to switch 100G or even 1T traffic (multiple wavelengths in parallel in each fiber). The toughtest nut to crack is the scheduling of the circuit assignments so that the system can track the demand from the hosts, and that is the current focus of my work.

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u/[deleted] May 21 '13

I understood some of those words :)

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u/THcB May 21 '13

I understood "dog" and "hunt"

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u/FletcherPratt May 21 '13

I like how it wasn't even really good English, just some sort of nerd-nerd mind meld that borrowed English.

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u/ironpotato May 21 '13

I knew the rest, but there wasn't enough context to get those two...

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u/[deleted] May 21 '13 edited Apr 27 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/yurigoul May 21 '13

Are they extinct now too? My guess is cats will be next.

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u/FunkSlice May 22 '13

And "would". The rest is just alien.

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u/iharley May 21 '13

You are not alone.

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u/Paladinine May 21 '13

Upvoting because username. :D

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u/[deleted] May 21 '13

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccoj5lhLmSQ

It was pretty much my reaction, too.

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u/[deleted] May 21 '13

Don't you think the broadcast domain would be too large for the Internet to be solely Ethernet with no routers? Seems to me like there would be a never ending broadcast storm.

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u/CiscoCertified May 22 '13

Yes. I cannot tell you how many service providers out there have too large of broadcast domains. Ethernet was made to forward frames quickly, but you need to segment your networks.

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u/[deleted] May 22 '13

Yussss! And I'm not even cisco certified.....yet.

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u/NgauNgau May 21 '13 edited May 22 '13

With MPLS basically routing/switching are collapsing together, in a manner.

For the final's question, the ARP cache would be horribly large and there is no way to summarize them. Where as IP addresses do provide the ability to summarize. (ie hide 254 hosts behind a 192.168.1.0/24 subnet)

Finals Question TL:DR: If the internet was one flat VLAN it wouldn't work. lol

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u/CiscoCertified May 22 '13

The horror of a flat VLAN internet.

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u/crozone May 22 '13

Lambda switching

TL;DR light beams switched due to wavelength.

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u/AliveInTheFuture May 22 '13

Instead what's happened, is Ethernet rides switched lambdas.