In 1981 Intel,Digital and Xerox jointly defined the Ethernet standard.
you should notice that intel's name doesn't come up till paragraph three. intel pioneered ethernet the same way they've pioneered x64.
en.wikipedia.org
Ethernet was originally developed as one of the many pioneering projects at Xerox PARC. Ethernet was invented in the period of 1973–1975.[1] Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs wrote and presented their "Draft Ethernet Overview" some time before March 1974. In March 1974, R.Z. Bachrach wrote a memo to Metcalfe and Boggs, and their management, stating that "technically or conceptually there is nothing new in your proposal" and that "analysis would show that your system would be a failure." This analysis was flawed, however, in that it ignored the "channel capture effect", though this was not understood until 1994. In 1975, Xerox filed a patent application listing Metcalfe and Boggs, plus Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson, as inventors (U.S. Patent 4,063,220 : Multipoint data communication system with collision detection). In 1976, after the system was deployed at PARC, Metcalfe and Boggs published a paper titled Ethernet: Distributed Packet-Switching For Local Computer Networks.
The experimental Ethernet described in that paper ran at 3 Mbit/s, and had 8-bit destination and source address fields, so Ethernet addresses were not the global addresses they are today. By software convention, the 16 bits after the destination and source address fields were a packet type field, but, as the paper says, "different protocols use disjoint sets of packet types", so those were packet types within a given protocol, rather than the packet type in current Ethernet, which specifies the protocol being used.
Metcalfe left Xerox in 1979 to promote the use of personal computers and local area networks (LANs), forming 3Com. He convinced DEC, Intel, and Xerox to work together to promote Ethernet as a standard, |
