Timeline for Was 10BASE5 a mistake?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
23 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 20, 2021 at 13:25 | comment | added | Stefan Skoglund | @davidbak one of the reasons why Metcalfe started 3Com was the slugginesh in XEROX office computer division.... WHEN will we products ? | |
| Nov 20, 2021 at 13:23 | comment | added | Stefan Skoglund | @davidbak : XEROX had a vision about designing and selling the future office: control of hw and sw while selling connectability between the user's computers and the new laser printer. For them Ethernet was an enabler to take control of the office worker's equipment but they vastly underestimated the complexity with its difficulties for ONE company to produce all that and also the impact of competition. | |
| Nov 20, 2021 at 2:11 | comment | added | rwallace | @StefanSkoglund That's an interesting perspective that I thought was worth expanding on beyond the scope of this comment thread. Question posted at retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/22339/… | |
| Nov 19, 2021 at 8:59 | comment | added | Stefan Skoglund | One reason why 10BaseT became possible is Moores law (and the same for the other designs after that.) The designer's chip budget was only good enough for this. | |
| Nov 17, 2021 at 10:19 | answer | added | JeremyP | timeline score: 2 | |
| Nov 14, 2021 at 23:38 | comment | added | Eric Towers | Show of hands: who had to debug a "homebrew" 10BASE2 system that was an unlabelled mixture of 50 ohm and 75 ohm coax? | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 22:19 | comment | added | dave_thompson_085 | RS-232 was not twisted pair (RS-422 was, but was more expensive and rarely used); was limited to about 100kbps at most, usually 20k or 10k; and was guaranteed only for 50 feet although if you bought non-cheap gear you could get a few hundred at least most of the time. Networks of the day like SNA and DECnet (designed for even slower MAN/WAN wiring) operated over those connections, but nowhere near the speed of Ethernet. Early Sun workstations could use disks shared over Ethernet; over RS-232 that would have been unusable. | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 18:08 | comment | added | Barmar | @MichaelKay Furthermore, just about everything in the history of technology. | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 17:27 | comment | added | Michael Kay | It seems odd to think of a design as a "mistake" just because it was subsequently improved. On that basis pretty well everything in the history of computing was a mistake. | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 17:14 | comment | added | Solomon Slow | Back when we started using 10BASE5 in the Computer Science department where I went to college, we didn't think it was a mistake. We thought it was ****ing amazing! I had a friend at another school who flat-out refused to believe me when I tried to explain it to him. His professors had him convinced that communication over more than a few inches at those speeds was physically impossible. | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 14:10 | comment | added | Austin Hemmelgarn | If you want to call a specific networking protocol a mistake, I would argue that token ring (IEEE 802.5, and arguably 802.4 also but that solved some of the more glaring issues with 802.5) or 100BaseVG (IEEE 802.12, betting that even here most people have never heard of it) would be much bigger contenders for that title than 10Base5. | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 9:49 | answer | added | Jens | timeline score: 4 | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 7:05 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Nov 13, 2021 at 3:36 | vote | accept | rwallace | ||
| Nov 13, 2021 at 2:50 | comment | added | dave | My understanding is that Ethernet (at 3 Mb/s) was invented to go along with the personal computer (the Alto) that was also being invented. | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 1:49 | comment | added | cjs | @davidbak I know PARC made laser printers from photocopiers in the '70s. That they'd get involved with making photocopiers per se in the '80s makes some sense, since that was about the time things reversed and they started making photocopiers from laser printers. The same goes for intra-device LANs; they made little or no sense in the '70s, but started to in the '80s as the power of individual components increased and LAN interface chip costs decreased. Thus, CAN bus and the like. But this was not what Ethernet was originally developed for. | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 1:19 | answer | added | Kevin White | timeline score: 10 | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 0:47 | comment | added | davidbak | @cjs - source: my brother, who worked for xerox parc. and if you think parc had little to do with photocopiers / laser printers / and the like, think again. also it does make sense - wiring harnesses cost money - especially in support/maintenance. Though now I think of it ... that project he was on to replace wiring harnesses in photocopiers / laser printers with ethernet (which did happen) probably was much after the invention of ethernet. | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 0:43 | comment | added | cjs | @davidbak Do you have a source for that? Wikpedia's Ethernet History section gives the history as I know it, which is that it was invented in PARC, a computing research lab that had little to do with photocopiers. And "an embedded LAN" in photocopiers doesn't make much sense; why go to all that extra effort when you could use much simpler serial and parallel connections? (BTW, coax makes perfect sense when you want a wire "ether" to replace the radio ether, since when terminated it functions electrically in the same way.) | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 0:03 | comment | added | davidbak | Ethernet (don't know about 10BASE5 specifically, but Ethernet itself) was developed for use as an embedded LAN inside of Xerox's photocopiers. Coax was probably just fine for that application - not only that, but better than fine given the (probable) electrical noise inside of those boxes. Also, to be able to connect those copiers to workstations in their building. A big corporate campus building. Running coax was not a problem - not compared to the capabilities it provided. (Copiers/laser printers/and the like were damned expensive back then!) | |
| Nov 12, 2021 at 23:43 | answer | added | dave | timeline score: 19 | |
| Nov 12, 2021 at 23:38 | answer | added | cjs | timeline score: 43 | |
| Nov 12, 2021 at 23:04 | history | asked | rwallace | CC BY-SA 4.0 |