Lesson 2 of 81973–today8 min
The link layer: Ethernet, switching and VLANs
On 22 May 1973 Bob Metcalfe, a researcher at Xerox PARC, wrote a memo proposing a way to connect the lab's new workstations: one coaxial cable down the corridor, every computer tapping into it, and a name borrowed from the luminiferous ether of nineteenth-century physics. He and David Boggs built it, running at 2.94 Mb/s, and described it in Communications of the ACM in 1976.
The shared cable is long gone. The frame format and the 48-bit address it carried are still on every port of every switch you will ever configure.
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Sources
- Ethernet — Engineering and Technology History Wiki (IEEE History Center)
- Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks (Metcalfe, Boggs, 1976) — Communications of the ACM
- IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Working Group — IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee
- IEEE 802.1 Working Group (802.1Q bridges and VLANs) — IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee