1/ Almost the 49th birthday of Ethernet (3Mb)! Here's another History lesson and a story about my role in "holy wars" with 3Mb Ethernet and UNIX. Few people realize how long-lived and widespread 3Mb Ethernet became... 🧵 2/ May 22, 1973 is considered the birthday of "3 Megabit" Ethernet, when Bob Metcalfe published his memo … Continue reading 3Mb Ethernet and Holy Wars
Category: UNIX
Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago
40 years ago today: I joined a tiny startup called Sun Microsystems. What a ride! Here's the never-before-told story of how I arrived at Sun as employee #8! 🧵 I started out in Silicon Valley in June of 1978 working at Amdahl Corp. porting UNIX to the mainframe, a revival of the work started at … Continue reading Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago
Appletalk History
Who's ready for more Networking History? - all about APPLETALK! When the Apple Macintosh came out in 1984, it came with a new serial port implementation. Initially, it looked like nothing special - a port for a modem, a port for a printer. But internally it used the Zilog Z8530 SCC, which was a deviation … Continue reading Appletalk History
Ethernet History – MAC Addresses in SunOS
1/ How about an Ethernet history lesson? And a story about why I'm responsible for one of the most hated features of SunOS! 2/ The DEC, Intel Xerox Ethernet spec was published in 1980 after many years of Ethernet development at Xerox PARC led by @BobMetcalfe , Dave Boggs, and Ron Crane. This is a … Continue reading Ethernet History – MAC Addresses in SunOS
My Summer at Bell Labs (part 1)
In April of 1977, the end of my junior year at Princeton, I applied for a summer intern position with Bell Labs. Bell Labs had a high-volume internship program - lots of people from lots of places going into lots of different departments and locations. I really wanted to get into Center 127 which was … Continue reading My Summer at Bell Labs (part 1)
My Summer at Bell Labs (part 2)
My office mate for the summer was Bob Mitze, he was working on getting Steve Johnson's portable C compiler working on the AT&T 3B (1 or 2?) computer. Across the hall from us was the inimitable Greg Chesson, rest his soul. Greg was a real networking pioneer and I was fortunate to see him numerous … Continue reading My Summer at Bell Labs (part 2)
The Roots of UNIX for the IBM Mainframe (part 3)
In 1975 Ken Thompson had taken a sabbatical at U.C. Berkeley and catalyzed them into becoming the west coast center of UNIX expertise. While there, he became friends with Denny Koch. Denny went on to get a job with Amdahl Corp. Amdahl was a hot Silicon Valley startup taking on the ogre named IBM, and … Continue reading The Roots of UNIX for the IBM Mainframe (part 3)
The Roots of UNIX for the IBM Mainframe (part 2)
Joseph, Peter, and I set out to port UNIX to the 370 running VM/370. We had a running UNIX system on the PDP-11/45, complete with source code, so that was the obvious place to do development - we would cross-compile from PDP to 370 and then test on the 370. I don't remember the exact … Continue reading The Roots of UNIX for the IBM Mainframe (part 2)
The Roots of UNIX for the IBM Mainframe (part 1)
When I was a freshman at Princeton University in the 1974-75 school year the computer center hosted, for the state of New Jersey educational system, an IBM System/370 Model 158 running the marvelously interactive APL\360 system. It shared a room with Princeton's System/360 Model 91 which was an amazing beast but only ran batch jobs. … Continue reading The Roots of UNIX for the IBM Mainframe (part 1)