TABLE OF CONTENTS As indicated in the Preface, it is assumed that the reader has three to five years experience in the computer or telecommunications field. However, in the interest of ensuring that a common understanding of Ethernet is fostered at the beginning of this book, a review of Ethernet fundamentals, specifications, and hardware is delivered in this chapter. If nothing else, a refresher in the technology that this book revolves around certainly wouldn t hurt. That said, let s move forward.
Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe invented Ethernet technology at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s. It was designed to support research on the office of the future, which included one of the world s first personal workstations the Xerox Alto. The first Ethernet system ran at approximately 3 megabits per second (Mbps) and was known as experimental Ethernet.
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It should be noted that today the term Ethernet system can refer to a local area network (LAN) environment, a metropolitan area network (MAN) environment, and soon a wide area network (WAN) environment.
Formal specifications for Ethernet were published in 1980 by the multivendor consortium that created the DEC-Intel-Xerox (DIX) standard. Digital, Intel, and Xerox developed the technology jointly after working together to...
