[ih] Ethernet, was Why TCP?

[johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)]

>So if one wanted a cheaper mechanism, tossing out the extreme discipline 
>made sense to me.  We always hear about computing/storage tradeoffs. 
>This was a cost/channel-efficiency tradeoff.

It is my recollection that at the time a lot of people thought that
Ethernet sounded too good to be true.  If it were heavily loaded, all
those collisions would surely cause a storm of interference and
performance collapse, unlike a token ring that shared the capacity in
a predictable way.

As we all know, Ethernets worked just fine.  A lot of people didn't
believe it until they saw it, and sometimes not even then.

R's,
John