About Me

I'm John Huntington, author of Control Systems for Live Entertainment, the first book on show control and entertainment control systems. Through Zircon Designs, I do consulting and design work on entertainment control, show control, and audio systems, but this site contains many non-commercial resources related to entertainment, technology, and anything else I find interesting.

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Friday
03Jul2009

First Ethernet Cable

From Boing Boing, along with this:

Behind an ordinary door in a nondescript room hosting several printers and copiers at PARC is the world's first Ethernet cable. In 1973, Bob Metcalfe sent an internal memo to his colleagues at Xerox proposing a local system of interacting workstations, files, and printers. The devices would all be linked by one coaxial cable, he said, and would run within a local area network. He called the system an Ether Network, or Ethernet. By 1976, there were over 100 devices linked into Metcalfe's local network, and it was even used to test out the world's first laser printer, which was being developed concurrently in another research facility within Xerox. Metcalfe and his assistant David Boggs published their findings in the Association for Computing Machinery later that year. The rest is history.

Go to the Boing Boing link for Metcalf's original drawings of the system.

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