From owner-freebsd-hardware Sun Jun 30 08:14:25 1996 Return-Path: owner-hardware Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id IAA19299 for hardware-outgoing; Sun, 30 Jun 1996 08:14:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from zoo.toronto.edu (zoo.toronto.edu [128.100.72.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id IAA19294 for ; Sun, 30 Jun 1996 08:14:21 -0700 (PDT) Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996 11:13:55 -0400 (EDT) From: Henry Spencer Subject: Re: muliport boards - building a PPP dialup server To: Richard Foulk cc: hardware@freebsd.org, bsdi-users@bsdi.com In-Reply-To: <199606301022.AAA13860@pegasus.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hardware@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk I wrote: > ...stop thinking of Ethernet as an expensive LAN, and start thinking of it > as a fast alternative to RS232. ...It's a lot better and not > much more expensive. I should mention that, at one point, the original inventors of Ethernet seem to have had just this sort of role in mind. They hoped to make Ethernet the new RS232, a cheap and universal fast way of interconnecting computer equipment. Arguably it was a terrible mistake to raise the speed from 3Mb/s (the original experimental design) to 10Mb/s (the DIX standard), because it put Ethernet beyond easy reach of then-current chip technologies, and delayed the advent of really cheap Ethernet hardware by perhaps a decade. Henry Spencer henry@zoo.toronto.edu