ARCNet was nice, except for when people decided randomly to remove the terminator off the t-connector on the back of their desktop because "it looked weird" and thus taking down the whole network. That happened to me more than once doing network support in college.

ARCNet is mentioned heavily in The Big Bucks. I have to admit that I knew very little about it before doing research for the book.

One more book on the stack... Now I have to read it to find out how ARCNet worms it's way into a novel about sili valley.

This part's not in the book: Gordon Peterson, the architect of ARCNet, was a major source for me. He talked to Bob back in the day.

Gordon's still bitter about it, and will gladly tell you why Ethernet is inferior.

Ethernet is one of those case studies in "worse is better".

I remember the old saying that "Ethernet doesn't work in theory, but it does in practice". Mostly referring to the CSMA/CD scheme used before switches took over.

The competitive advantage of being built out of cheap commodity hardware and cabling is hard to overstate. Nobody likes dealing with vendors, their salespeople, and especially support contracts. Especially since that is always more expensive and often solves problems you don't have, like minimum latency guarantees, at the cost of throughput and complexity.

There were a lot of LAN schemes back then. Mostly forgotten now.

Many press commentators opined that of course "broadband" would be much better than "baseband" since it could carry voice and video, not just bits.

Agreed. Can't overstate the cost effectiveness. In the late 80s or early 90s you could put hundreds of dumb terminals on one network with just hubs for signal integrity. Plenty of collisions but it all worked itself out somehow if the throughput was light, such as text applications, text email, and a small amount of printing or sharing. This meant every university could have some kind of network scheme, making it a universal for the next gen.

I even put a whole section with that old debate in Inventing the Future (Janet, working at Xerox, is arguing with her husband Ken, who's at Hughes Aircraft):

==============

She’d heard that the product Xerox was going to ship was aiming for 20 megabits.1 It was amazing. But, as people at Xerox explained, imagine an entire office full of knowledge workers with their own computers, sending documents and email to each other and to the printer. How much bandwidth would they need? A lot! Someone in Palo Alto had done a whiteboard exercise on the bandwidth required for teleportation, in other words, sending an entire human being through the wire. It wasn’t that they took the prospect of teleportation seriously, but still, it was fun, and she enjoyed being around people who had fun at work.

Ken scoffed and insisted that Ethernet would never work. This was a recurring argument with them that was starting to annoy her, although usually she’d just smile and change the subject. He kept hurling the word deterministic as if it were a magic talisman. On the Ethernet, you weren’t certain how long you’d have to wait to transmit your data. If the wire was busy when you wanted to talk, you had to wait.

If someone else tried to transmit exactly when you did, you both had to back off and try again. An engineer could give you the probabilities of various results, but no more. This was not real engineering, and Ken was offended by it. He was even offended by the word “ether” since any beginning physics student knows that ether was a bogus concept that was disproven ages ago.

The entire communications field that the two of them had studied at MIT was based on strict mathematical calculations and guarantees. For example, when you make a telephone connection, that circuit is yours until you’re done. No other calls interfere with yours. The telephone companies had spent decades perfecting this system, and they had a monopoly. How could any company, even one as big as Xerox, hope to change that?

She tried telling him that packet-switching was a real discipline, and the Defense Department itself was backing it. It was originally designed to survive a nuclear attack that destroyed some of the military’s communications lines. With packet switching, the message was broken up into pieces, or packets, and the packets might arrive on separate paths. Ken didn’t believe it would ever have commercial applications. People in aerospace had a low opinion of commercial stuff anyway. 1 The original speed goal for the Xerox Wire was 20 megabits/sec. The first controller, for the Dolphin, had independent send and receive buffers, but could only be made to fit on the board using 10-Mbps CRC chips from Fairchild. Furthermore, in the lab, Tony found that 20-Mbps signaling caused spurious collision detects on the cable due to transceiver tap reflections.

There were a lot of LAN schemes - and slightly incompatible ethernet implementations. I remember when the Interop tradeshow in Vegas required vendors to either attach and integrate with the show network or they would get kicked off the floor. Good times!

Well.. I still want to read the book. I'm a sucker for a well crafted story about old hardware from the days when technology gods walked the earth.

I'm sure Ethernet's market domination is because the spec wasn't owned by a single company, and nothing to do with it's technical merits. After IBM's SNA, people seemed paranoid of a networking spec being owned by a single company. Do you know if Datapoint thought about that and whether they tried to build their own equivalent of the DIX consortium?

I also think about SpaceWire / IEEE-1355 / Wormhole Routing and what might have been had we adopted systems where compute power could be easily upgraded.

Oh! The good old days when everything was possible!

on DataPoint: my hero (sort of) Matt Feingold spends a summer internship at DataPoint. As far as he (and I) could tell, people still thought in terms of "account control" back then.

There's actually a book on DataPoint (and almost every other company from way back when). I read them so you don't have to :)

I get the impression that 10BASE-T killed ARCNet, and it was the "T" rather than the "10" that did so. Running cheap CAT-5 to a set of interconnected hubs was just so much easier and more reliable than t-connectors, terminators &c.