5/18/98 NY Times. Before Windows and Internet, There Was Ethernet
(from your friendly ASND thread in the name of coopetition -- the latest buzz word...)
By JOHN MARKOFF
nytimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO -- Robert Metcalfe looks at the Microsoft
civil war and other open hostilities in the software industry and
remembers when the computer business was a kinder, gentler place to
work.
But that was long before Microsoft's current battle with federal and
state governments and before the various other intramural industry fights
in which one company or coalition strives to use control of a key
technology as a means of gaining market dominance.
This week brings the 25th anniversary of Ethernet, a computing
technology that Metcalfe helped invent and that in many ways was and
still is as central and widely used in modern business computing as
Microsoft's vaunted Windows operating system software.
But compared with Windows,
which Microsoft holds in a vise-like
grip, Ethernet is technology that
followed a different, communal
path. And it is a course that some
experts say may still be worth
emulating, if the industry is going to
be driven by innovation rather than
by the sort of infighting that now
finds Microsoft under threat of
antitrust suits over its use of its
Windows operating system
standard as a proprietary tool both
to control markets and to leverage
its way into new ones. On top of that, Sun Microsystems is battling
Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard over control of Sun's Java
programming language.
Ethernet, a combination of hardware and software for linking desktop
computers or work stations into office networks, has an estimated 100
million users, supported by Cisco Systems, 3Com and about 100 other
makers of Ethernet software and hardware, with combined annual sales
of $15.5 billion.
But unlike Windows (or Java, or you name the software standard and
somebody is probably jealously squabbling over it), Ethernet was
developed by a company that quickly ceded it to the larger computing
industry. And in contrast to a proprietary industry standard like
Windows, which Microsoft controls, Ethernet has always been what
software engineers call an open system -- one with a common technical
core around which any company could create its own complementary
products.
"Bill Gates, et al, have usurped the term 'open,"' Metcalfe said. "But
Ethernet has remained pure; it is a true open standard."
Metcalfe, who made his millions from an Ethernet company he founded,
3Com Corp., and now functions primarily as an industry ambassador
without portfolio, will preside over a computer and communications
conference this week in Laguna Niguel, Calif. There, on Thursday, he
and other key members of the research team that created the
technology will attend an anniversary party for Ethernet.
The story of how Ethernet became the de facto office networking
standard is an important counterpoint to the bitter fighting that now
characterizes most computer industry technologies, according to
Metcalfe.
Ethernet grew out of the same confluence of research efforts a
generation ago that led to the development of the TCP/IP
communications software standard on which today's Internet is based.
Metcalfe had written his doctoral dissertation on packet data
communications at Harvard, and when he arrived at Xerox's legendary
Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970s, he turned his attention to
developing an office network that would for the first time permit
workers to each have a desktop computer while sharing use of
common equipment like printers and central storage computers called
file servers.
In 1973, he and a fellow researcher at Xerox invented a network
system capable of transmitting and receiving data at 3 million bits a
second -- considered blazing speed in those days.
"The idea was that you could simply plug into the 'ether' wherever your
computer was located," said Yogan Dalal, who joined the team several
years later and served as Ethernet project manager at Xerox's Palo
Alto center. He is now a partner at the Mayfield Fund, a venture capital
firm in Menlo Park, Calif., that financed Metcalfe in 1979 when he
founded 3Com as the first maker of Ethernet network circuitry cards.
(Mayfield is sponsoring this week's anniversary party.)
Xerox, recognizing that it did not need to be in the office cabling
business but that it did want to encourage wide use of its copiers,
printers and computers, decided to all but give away the Ethernet
technology.
To be sure, Ethernet did not immediately become the dominant industry
standard. In the 1980s, IBM -- as dominant in the computer industry as
Microsoft is considered today -- aggressively promoted a separate
networking standard called token ring. And various small Silicon Valley
companies were pursuing their own local-area-network approaches.
Eventually, however, Ethernet became the dominant approach as
companies and their customers gravitated toward the open standard.
Whatever wrinkles their own software or hardware might take, they
knew that as long as it was based on the Ethernet core, any product
would work with all other Ethernet products. Today, network routers,
file servers and shared printers are among the common network
resources that can be traced to the open Ethernet standard.
And this tradition allowed the industry to reach agreement on new
generations of the technology, like Ethernet formats capable of
transmitting as much as 1 billion bits of information each second.
But such harmony, with its potential for mutual profitability, is rare now.
Since the mid-1980s, when computer makers began quarreling over the
direction of another supposedly open technology -- the Unix operating
system still widely used in research, financial, corporate and World
Wide Web applications -- conflict over proprietary technical standards
has been more the rule.
To be sure, Microsoft executives argue that their Windows and
Windows NT operating systems are open. They note that tens of
thousands of programmers can freely write software that is compatible
with the Windows standard.
But Microsoft's approach fails the true test of openness, Metcalfe
contends, because only Microsoft controls the operating system and
only Microsoft decides when to publish the supporting documentation.
Standards are genuinely open, he said, only when they are publicly
documented, nonproprietary, and when there is a public forum for
updating the standard.
"The big difference is, the Ethernet standard is a public document the
public owns," he said.
Ethernet specifications are overseen by an industry group known as the
802.3 standards committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers.
Open systems are again gaining support in some parts of the computer
industry. A number of executives are coming to see the open systems
approach as a way of avoiding the dominance of proprietary vendors
like Microsoft.
Sun Microsystems, for example, has made efforts to turn the Java
standard over to the International Standards Organization. And there is
broad support among programmers for Linux, a freely available version
of Unix. Recently, Netscape Communications Corp. made the source
code to its browser publicly available in the hope it would create a
groundswell of innovation -- not to mention the kind of widespread
industry support that might make Communicator better able to compete
with Microsoft's browser, the Internet Explorer.
The 802.3 Ethernet standard is the legacy of David Liddle, now
director of Interval Research Corp. in Palo Alto but in 1979, a Xerox
executive. After Ethernet patents were issued in 1973, it had taken the
better part of six years for the technology-in-theory to move toward
real products. So Liddle persuaded Xerox's upper management to take
the unusual step of licensing Ethernet in a way that insured it would
remain an open standard. The approach: License the Ethernet patents
to any person or company for a $1,000 fee, and turn over
administration of the standard and subsequent refinements to an industry
group.
Metcalfe played a key role in the decision. Early in 1979, after leaving
Xerox but before starting 3Com, he was serving as a consultant to
Gordon Bell, a computer designer at Digital Equipment. Bell wanted
Metcalfe to help him design computer networks for Digital, but the two
men soon came up with the idea of seeking cooperation from Xerox
instead of inventing a competing technology.
So Metcalfe drafted a letter proposing that they license Ethernet, and
Bell sent it to Liddle at Xerox. "Liddle said yes," Metcalfe recalled. And
a month later, Digital and Xerox persuaded an ambitious young chip
maker, Intel Corp., to join the alliance. "Since then," Metcalfe said, "it
has worked wonderfully."
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3com Corp.
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