[124874] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: what about 48 bits?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roland Perry)
Wed Apr 7 04:06:01 2010
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2010 09:03:40 +0100
To: nanog@nanog.org
From: Roland Perry <lists@internetpolicyagency.com>
In-Reply-To: <4BBBF070.6000403@sprunk.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
In article <4BBBF070.6000403@sprunk.org>, Stephen Sprunk
<stephen@sprunk.org> writes
>Ah, but what _caused_ Ethernet to become ubiquitous, given the price was
>initially comparable?
For me, as an SME user, I started using Ethernet when Dlink introduced
an ISA card [DE205] which had a 4-port hub built in (actually 5-port if
you counted the internal one), at not a great deal more than a normal
10Base-T card. I think it was about $250, when a typical desktop PC was
$2500.
So all I needed to build my network was one of those, some cable, and
add-in Ethernet cards for each other PC I wanted to bring into the LAN.
As icing on the cake, they also had a Centronics-port dongle to hook up
almost all laptops very easily, and in an emergency you could even use
it on a desktop.
Price was a major feature, but interoperability and backwards
compatibility were the tipping points.
--
Roland Perry
