[TUHS] Was artifacts, now ethernet

I'd like to talk to Robert because I'm willing to bet how 100Mb ethernet came to be is not well known. Feel free to forward this to him. Somewhere in the early middle-ish 90s, I was working for Ken Okin in the server hardware division, building Sun's first cluster. It was just a bunch of small servers behind a modified kalpana ethernet switch (the mods were my version of VLANs, I didn't know VLANs existed at that time). The Kalpana switch opened my eyes to what ethernet could do and could evolve to in the future if we made ethernet faster. So I wandered over to Sun's networking hardware and asked if they could build 100Mb ethernet over copper. I was too stupid to realize that they thought I was asking them to signal at 100Mb the same way they signaled at 10Mb. Which doesn't work because of crosstalk issues (which I didn't know about at the time, I'm more software than hardware). So they told it couldn't be done and I went back to SMCC with my tail between my legs. It's worth noting that I was sitting one office away from avb and we had past history. I got him to redesign some memory interconnect because I had actual memory latency results from all the current hardware (everyone's not just Suns) and I had a pretty good idea of all the roadmaps because the processor architects talked to me because they loved the micro benchmarks in LMbench because they were tiny and ran fast on their simulators. The design he had was gonna suck and make us look bad so he stopped the project and designed a lower latency one. That's a long way of saying that avb had some respect for me. One day, a company called Crescendo Communications showed up to pitch me CDDI which was FDDI over copper. That signaled at 100Mb. As soon as I got it, I asked them to wait, went and told avb he needed to hear this. Pulled him into the conference room, told them this is Sun employee #1, can you do the pitch again. It's worth noting they did not ask us to sign an NDA. We're walking back to our offices and avb sort of grins and says something like "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" I said "yup, 100Mb ethernet, nobody wants FDDI packets if they could have ethernet packets". Here is why it is unlikely that anyone knows about this. Andy did something very smart, he said this couldn't be a Sun project, it would die if it were. Sun had done mmap, vnodes, NFS, RPC, etc, and the rest of the industry was sick and tired of chasing Sun. The whole OSF thing was basically "everyone but Sun". Andy said here is what we're gonna do (I did some but it was mostly him at this point): we're getting in our cars and we're calling on every networking company in the value, we're looking for a high up engineer or their lead architect. And all we're gonna say is "did you know that you can signal over copper at 100Mb like this? Wouldn't it be nice if we got 100Mb ethernet?" And it worked. It wasn't a Sun project, noone remembered that I had anything to do with it, Andy kept a very low profile, and I believe we got 100Mb "ethernet" cards trickling out in about 6 months. In quotes because it wasn't a standard yet. The funny thing is I've done a lot of other stuff that people know about, but I'm more proud of the fact that I pushed for 100Mb and it actually happened, that's a far bigger deal than anything else I've done (and I know, I didn't do 100Mb ethernet but I saw it before anyone else did and pushed for it and Andy, and to some extent, I made it happen). I also did a back of the paper napkin design of the ethernet switch that Granite built, Andy found me in a bar in San Francisco (or somewhere up there) and asked me if I could have a perfect ethernet switch what would it look like. But that's a different story and probably not for here. On Sat, Jul 19, 2025 at 10:02:12AM -0700, Tom Lyon wrote: -- --- Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat