Before Windows and Internet, There Was Ethernet nytimes.com
An amusing sidebar to the NYT article. John Markoff talking to old Bob Metcalfe, whose infoworld pieces I've noted here from time to time.
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. . . .
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."
Ah, open, anybody remember that little ongoing debate? War is peace, ignorance is strength, Windows is open. Posted way too much on that one, now the Microphiles still throw it out on occasion, but it's hard to work up more than sarcasm anymore, in that context, as in so many others. Hi Sal. Bastardized enough for you?
Cheers, Dan. |
