jooles,

Bob Metcalf was of course at Xerox, invented Ethernet, and did or was highly involved with the implemention of the first 3 megabit Ethernet prototype at Xerox. Shortly thereafter the DIX or XID (take your pick) consortium was formed. I was part of the group at Intel. Bob Beach at Intel actually wrote the spec--that's his pseudo-Pascal defining the protocol that's still in the IEEE 802.3 spec to this day. I met Bob Metcalf, and worked with him a small bit in the DIX meetings. That was a quarter century ago (!!!); I don't think I'd recognize him if I saw him on the street today.

The first official standard was the DEC/Intel/Xerox "Blue Book." IEEE later picked it up and made an IEEE standard out of it. (Well, "picked it up" isn't quite how it happened; the politics involved were quite amazing, with IBM trying to kill off Ethernet because the official bussiness network standard had to be an IBM creation. Hence token ring...)

I don't really have a favorite OS, (other than the ones I've written [Linked Image] ). I moved out of networking into other things over the years, and haven't spent much time looking over the various OS's out there. I do chip design now (I do happen to have a 10/100/1000 Ethernet IP core available [Linked Image] ), and since all my tools run on Windows, I use Windows.

pdh, that's actually a really good idea. As you managed to read between the lines in my last post, a couple years ago I did embark on an effort to see what it would take to productize some of the OS/networking technology I have around. And as I said, I found that the scope of the driver support problem was just too, too big. I did look at whether there is a way to support either Windows or Linux device drivers in their native form, but one would have to clone a major portion of Windows or Linux to do that, which kind of defeats the purpose. I hadn't looked at grafting my stuff onto Linux. That might work, or it might not. At the moment, I'm deep into other things, but I might take a look at that if I move back in that direction.

jooles, that article looks quite interesting. I'll take a look at it when I have a bit more time. Thanks

--Solar




[This message has been edited by SolarPowered (edited 05-04-2005).]