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):
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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.
