Ethernet (50th Birthday) - Computerphile

"Ethernet" was named because the inventor believed that the standard could transcend different types of media & 50 yrs on, we still use it! Dr Steve Bagley explains and demos the idea


This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[lindavid]

I worked with Sailesh Rao, the inventor of 1000 Base-T (802.3ab-1999) at Intel (and Level One) - every time I plug an Ethernet cable into a router. I remember him scribbling "the architecture of 4D-PAM5 encoding, with 4 lines each transferring 250 Mb/s" on a white board and saying, "give me the BER for this on CAT-5 - maybe use Matlab!"

[insu_na]

Bit sad how he didn't mention that once a collision is detected, all sending machines "scream" for a short amount of time to announce to everyone that a collision just occurred and retransmission would be attempted shortly

[laurenlewis]

The bit of expert improv at 5:50 that both Sean and Steve immediately picked up on was *chef's kiss*

[elliotyu]

Steve's struggle with the sticker at 8:47 and Sean's strategic zoom-in was both clever and unintentionally hilarious

[SeanBZA]

Ethernet won out because the standard was free to use, and also did not need you to pay a license fee per card, unlike some of the competitors, like Token Ring, where you had to pay IBM for it, and Arcnet did not scale as well, even though it did use a very much cheaper cable, but in the end Ethernet would run on the same cables, and being low cost the cards got cheap fast, and of course got used a lot, so the peripherals grew fast, and the cost kept dropping. Still have the crimp tooling for Arcnet, which came in really handy doing CCTV work, as the connectors are almost completely compatible in most cases.

[BillySugger]

It would be amazing to make a video describing the CAN network used in modern vehicles and industrial automation. The csma/cd and bus arbitration techniques are simple and elegant, and the protocol is a superb illustration of how multi-drop networks can be implemented in embedded systems for sending and control.

[pev_]

I got a job as a researcher in one of my university's tech labs in 1997, and it was just the time when thick ethernet (10base5) was over and everybody was laying thin ethernet cables (10base2) through every PC, with the T-adapters and terminating resistors :) And then of course after some time we changed to 10baseT and it was at first somewhat puzzling having to have a separate cable for each PC. At first it was to hubs (sort of dummy repeaters) but later switches started to became the norm. Ahh the nostalgia!

[martingallagher]

I have a memory of reading a Usenet post where one of the original ethernet designers said if he could change one thing in 10base5 it would be the slide lock connectors on the drop cables. That made me smile, we had lots of hassles with them.

[tomhekker]

Great video. As a networking nerd I work with Ethernet all the time and it’s simplicity and yet it’s ingenuity always surprises me.

[joncarter]

Bus networks really take me back, I remember in my first year at senior school having an IT room full of Acorn Archimedes and if we all logged on at the same time it would seriously slow down and eventually would crash the whole network! I think we were using Acorn proprietary cables though instead of ethernet and it was running on Acorn's EcoNet standard.

[cphrpunk]

Thank heavens they didn’t stick to the DIX name.

The recent CHM panel video is truly excellent.

Yes, vampire taps weren’t friendly and often resulted in a trip to find bandages. AUI connectors we’re still used quite a bit into the mid, and even late, 90’s, especially on what we now call MDF switches.

Also, promiscuous mode is a modern concept, switches didn’t exist originally, only hubs and bridges. You could see everything, everywhere from anywhere.

And of course, 10-BASE-T, full-duplex with separate TX/RX pairs into switches (instead of hubs) ultimately all but eliminated collisions.

[AlphaYellow]

Xerox PARC came up with some of the best tech innovations of all time, Ethernet is high up there.

[TheMohawkNinja]

That cybersecurity lab environment looks like a lot of fun. A designated "red" and "blue" sides with a retractable padded wall to keep the teams apart during labs.

[mfbfreak]

The resiliency of modern ethernet is impressive. It'll run even without all wires connected. At a certain point i was running it on some weird 6 wire intercom or phone cable that i have no idea of, how it ended up on my PC.
It did explain why i wasn't getting the usual speed.
Another interesting occurance was when i suffered from a lot of radio interference. Took me until i noticed my ethernet connection was running at 10mbit that i re-inserted the plug, and the interference was gone. Evidently again not all of the contacts of the plug made good contact, making it a non-paired cable, radiating tons of RF hash.
Aside from those freak issues, wired ethernet has been that old, rock solid technology that just works all the time. Only thing that sucks is trying to make your own cables with low budget tools.

[JxH]

Even today, I'm still using scrapped 30+ year old 10BASE2 networking cables (with BNC connectors) to build antennas and use as radio feedlines. I grabbed a lifetime supply when it was being thrown out.

[dawidcham]

It became popular precisely because you could freely plug or unplug a machine without bringing down the network

[Einar-Indrida]

I just love it at around 03:30 ... they have images of the BBC machine (sans monitor) connected to each other!

[marksterling]

Ethernet relay came into its own when network switching became affordable. Then with full duplex no collisions. A bus network that became a star or hub spoke network.

[tomschmidt]

In the beginning of the video I'm so focused on UTP and switches it tool a while to realize he was talking about the original thick wire and vampire taps. Great overview about early Ethernet.

[zapapnt]

"The one network, to rule them all, even though it's not a ring network."
The fact he said Groan.
The fact they left in the O...M...G!
Nerds! 🙄🙄🙄