Tom Lyon's Personal Blog
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
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
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
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
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 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)
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)
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)
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)