Invention

o 1973-76 Robert Metcalfe & David Boggs at Xerox PARC

o 1970 PARC's mission: "an architecture of information" for the office products of the 1980's (1, 268)

o Metcalfe from Project MAC

o connects MAXC to ARPANET

o connect Alto workstations and laser printers

o models ethernet after ALOHAnet (packet radio)

o Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection (CSMA/CD)

o Transceiver: if line not busy then send packet (frame) else wait and retry

o Transceiver: listen for my packets (frames)

o runs at 3Mbps

o 1979 Xerox, DEC, Intel standard

Current Technology

o Overview

o Cisco Systems - Ethernet Technologies

o Charles Spurgeon.  Ethernet: The Definitive Guide.  O'Reilly and Associates, 2002.

LAN Alternative

o IBM Token Ring

1. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Basic Books, 1996).

2. Paul E. Ceruzzi. A History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2000).