Ethernet will never work
At least, that's what its inventors were told. The text below is from Wikipedia. Posted because SKS has publicly compared Wave to Ethernet as an emerging industry standard. Like the CDMA story in the previous post, interesting to compare Ethernet's emergence with what we know about Wave
The Wikipedia Article:
Ethernet was originally developed as one of the many pioneering projects at Xerox PARC. Ethernet was invented in the period of 1973–1975. 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, 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."[1] In 1975, Xerox filed a patent application listing Metcalfe and Boggs, plus Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson, as inventors (U.S. Patent 4063220 : 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.
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, the so-called "DIX" standard, for "Digital/Intel/Xerox"; it standardized the 10 megabits/second Ethernet, with 48-bit destination and source addresses and a global 16-bit type field. The standard was first published on September 30, 1980. It competed with two largely proprietary systems, token ring and ARCNET, but those soon found themselves buried under a tidal wave of Ethernet products. In the process, 3Com became a major company.
Metcalfe sometimes jokingly credits Jerome H. Saltzer for 3Com's success. Saltzer co-wrote an influential paper suggesting that token-ring architectures were theoretically superior to Ethernet-style technologies. This result, the story goes, left enough doubt in the minds of computer manufacturers that they decided not to make Ethernet a standard feature, which allowed 3Com to build a business around selling add-in Ethernet network cards. This also led to the saying "Ethernet works better in practice than in theory," which, though a joke, actually makes a valid technical point: the characteristics of typical traffic on actual networks differ from what had been expected before LANs became common in ways that favor the simple design of Ethernet. Add to this the real speed/cost advantage Ethernet products have continually enjoyed over other (token, FDDI, ATM, etc.) LAN implementations and we see why today's result is that "connect the PC to the network" means connect it via Ethernet. Even when the PC is connected by Wi-Fi, nearly all Wi-Fi gear uses Ethernet for connecting to the rest of the network.
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