It Changed Our World As Few Things Have Done in the Whole History of Human Kind: Ethernet
In our teaching, we have been lucky to have two Turing Prize winners as quest speakers: Len Aldeman (the “A” in RSA) and Marty Hellman (the “H” in the DH key exchange method). If you don’t know about the Turing Prize, then it is the nearest that Computer Science has to a Nobel Prize in Physics. And, so, this week it was announced that Bob Metcalfe would receive the latest prize. Why? Well, he invented Ethernet.
Overall, Ethernet basically built the Internet, and is the most common method to connect to a network. Even Wi-fi is built around an Ethernet-type format for its data packet integration. From 1Mbps data rates with coaxial broadcast methods (CSMA/CD), it has scaled with network switches to give rates of 100Gbps.
Bob outlined Ethernet on 22 May 1973 at the Xerox Research (PARC) lab. He went on to found 3Com, and which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2009 for $2.7 billion.
Overall, Ethernet fitted into Layer 2 of the OSI model, and where we create data frames to take the Layer 3 data packets and encapsulate them for transmission (Figure 2).
