“The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
– Winston Churchill
It is nearly impossible – even foolish – to look ahead without looking back. Glimpses into the past can give us inspiration for new innovations and even teach us what not to do. Behind every great technological innovation is a solid legacy product or solution that inspired it or played an integral part in its development. Behind the printing press was paper and block printing. Behind the telephone was the telegraph. And behind the Internet of Everything (IoE)? Ethernet.
Today – May 22 – marks the 40th anniversary of Ethernet. In 1973, technologist and 3Com founder Robert Metcalfe designed the Ethernet to allow computer devices to communicate with each other using radio-like signals over an antenna cable. Long used for reliable and efficient access to information, its implications on the networking world reach far past the local area network (LAN).
Over the course of 40 years, our quest for connecting the unconnected continues. Our connections have become increasingly complex since Metcalfe was tasked with connecting several Xerox computers to a single printer, and we need to understand the possibilities in both the number and value of our modern-day connections.
In a previous blog post, How the Internet of Everything Will Change the World…for the Better, I referenced Metcalfe’s law: the power of the network is greater than the sum of its parts. True. But the parts need to be recognized and optimized in order to maximize this power. The Internet of Everything is a large-scale metaphor for Metcalfe’s law. The combined connections of people, processes, data, and things don’t just amount to a list of things that are connected. The actionable insights that exist with the power of networked connectivity exponentially create the Internet of Everything.
Ethernet has helped further the progress that these connections – and the insights gleaned from them – will have on the Internet of Everything. So, today we celebrate not only the introduction of Ethernet, but also the technologies it made possible.
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Learn more about Cisco’s Ethernet solutions.
It is hard to remember but back in 1969 I was involved in a technology job at the John Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I was in the Air Force at the time and I can remember what a computer system was a that time.
What a difference it is now.
Let’s connect our globe!
La primera transmisión de datos codificados mediante pulsos eléctricos fue la telegrafía mediante el código de Morse a través de líneas de alambre de cobre. Cuando aparece Ethernet en esa época yo estaba operando con los famosos sistemas telegráficos inalambricos llamados TOR(Teletype Over Radio) y TONE (Tono) que permitían interconectar teletipos mediante señales de RF usando técnicas de banda lateral única independientes donde los pulsos se codificaban mediante tonos de diferentes frecuencias para modular la portadora en las bandas de HF. Han transcurrido muchos años y en la actualidad utilizo las redes de computadoras en las bandas de WIFI que utilizan la norma Ethernet. Saludos
i would like get materials regarding cisco course like ccna,ccnp and so on.
thanks