The past few days I have been attending Light Reading’s Ethernet Expo a coming of age for the amazing technology that enables Web 2.0. Robert Metcalfe himself gave the opening keynote and he delighted in telling us the story of doing a demo of Ethernet for a group of AT&T engineers back in 1973, his computer crashed and the old school engineers breathed a sigh of relief thinking that this packet switching was going nowhere.
Today Ethernet technology is everywhere, from home networks to multinational corporate Lans and transcontinental optical fiber networks. Ethernet has paralleled the PC in development, following the path set by Gordon Moore and has scaled from an experiment at Xerox Park to handling network traffic around the globe. Ethernet has been successful for two simple reasons, it’s cheaper and faster and cheaper and faster always win. .
Robert Metcalfe is excited by Ethernets potential to do to embedded devices what we have already done for the PC by networking them all together. The message at the ARM Developer conference last week was the same, connecting tiny devices will enable amazing things to happen. The competition from around the world is going to be fierce in this new era of connected devices, but New York born Bob Metcalfe likes to say it’s what focuses us on doing new and exciting things.
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