Ethernet is named after a substance physicists no longer believe exists
In a memo dated 22 May 1973, Robert Metcalfe of Xerox PARC called his new office network The Ether Network. The name recalled the old idea of a luminiferous aether filling space and carrying light. The aether turned out to be fiction, but Ethernet went on to wire much of the world.
Its roots lie in ALOHAnet, a 4,800-bit-per-second radio network built in the late 1960s at the University of Hawaii by Norman Abramson. If a message went unacknowledged, the sender waited a random interval and tried again. In 1972 Metcalfe and David Boggs applied that idea to a shared coaxial cable linking Xerox's Alto prototype computers to its laser printers and the ARPANET. By 1976, 100 Altos at PARC were connected, a patent filed with Charles Thacker and Butler Lampson was granted in 1977, and a faster 10-megabit version followed.
Rivals such as IBM's Token Ring and Datapoint's ARCnet were proprietary, so Metcalfe, Gordon Bell and David Liddle pushed for an open standard instead. Digital Equipment, Intel and Xerox published the joint specification in 1980, and the IEEE turned it into its 802.3 standard in 1983; Xerox handed over its patents so anyone could build it. Metcalfe had meanwhile left in 1979 to co-found 3Com, whose EtherLink card, priced at 950 dollars, used a single chip for most functions, introduced thinner cable and became the first Ethernet adapter for the IBM PC. With IBM shipping 200,000 PCs a month by 1982 and no networking of its own for them, EtherLink filled the gap.
Cheaper cabling sealed the victory. Novell's NE2000 cards, licensed widely from 1989, drove prices down, and in 1990 a standard for running Ethernet over ordinary twisted-pair telephone wire arrived. Sales nearly doubled the next year, and by 1992 Ethernet was the default for local networks. Kalpana's switches in the 1990s allowed many simultaneous paths and then full-duplex links.
Data travels in frames carrying source and destination addresses plus error checks, so damaged frames can be discarded. Its 48-bit hardware addresses were even adopted by Wi-Fi. Speeds have risen from 2.94 megabits per second to 800 gigabits, with 1.6 terabits in development.
Source: Ethernet
