17 Jan
2017
17 Jan
'17
5:43 p.m.
Oh wow flashbacks to the joys of using ATM LANE over OC-3 as that 155Mb was "so
superior" to 10 Mbit Ethernet and how "straightforward" it was getting
pvp's from the phone company and setting up the LECS, BUS, LES, and each LEC. And
how all the consultants scoffed at PC's with 100mbit Ethernet as the old 33Mhz bus
couldn't push 100mbit in their crazy minds of thinking all buses push data one byte
at a time. It was great once we started to get Cisco fast Etherchannel on the acquired
catalyst switches so we could dump ATM at the core and even better to get those dance
Intel NICs that could also FEC for super high bandwidth servers. It's a shame it
took a while to get metroE and ether WAN, but here we are in that awesome future devoid of
the disaster of ATM as it couldn't even begin to scale at and beyond OC-128, 10 gig E
put an end to all that nonsense.
There was a brief window I made some good money setting up ATM networks, but they all went
from oc12 to at the end being over t1 bonds for rural areas. Can't say I miss it.
On January 17, 2017 12:44:21 AM GMT+08:00, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 11:00:00AM -0500, Doug McIlroy
wrote:
--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
The highest levels of AT&T were happy to
carry digital data, but
did not see digital as significant business. Even though digital T1
was the backbone of long-distance transmission, it was IBM, not
AT&T, that offered direct digital interfaces to T1 in the 60s.
AT&T seemed pretty clueless about networking. I gave a short talk at
Hot
Interconnects in the heyday of ATM. Paul Borrill got me a speaking
spot,
I wasn't well known person but inside of Sun I had been railing against
ATM and pushing for 100Mbit ethernet and Paul decided to see what the
rest of the world thought.
The gist of my talk was that ATM was a joke. I had an ATM card (on
loan
from Sun Networking), I think it was 155 Mbit card. I also had an
ethernet card that I had bought at Fry's on my way to the talk.
The ATM card cost $4000. The ethernet card cost $49 IIRC.
The point I was making was that ATM was doomed. This was at the time
in
history when every company was making long bets on ATM, they all
thought
it was the future; well, all meaning the execs had been convinced.
I held up the two cards, disclosed the cost, and said "this ATM card is
always going to be expensive but the ethernet card is gonna be $10 in
a year or two. Why? Volume. Every computer has ethernet, it's gonna
do nothing but get cheaper. And you're gonna see ethernet over fiber,
long haul, you're going to see 100 Mbit, gigabit ethernet, and it's
going to be cheap. ATM is going nowhere."
There was a shocked silence. Weirdest talk ever, the room just went
silent for what seemed forever. Then someone, I'm sure it was an
engineer
who had been forced to work on ATM, started clapping. Just one guy.
And then the whole room joined in.
I took the silence as "yeah, but my boss says I have to" and the
clapping
as "we agree".
At the time AT&T was the biggest pusher of ATM. Telephone switches
were
big and expensive and it was clear, to me at least, that AT&T looked at
all those cheap ethernet switches and said "yeah, let's get the
industry
working on phone switching and we'll get cheap switches too". Nice
idea,
didn't work out.