what about 48 bits?

Wed Apr 7 03:02:12 UTC 2010

On 4/6/2010 10:39 PM, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
> On 05 Apr 2010 12:43, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>> On Mon, 05 Apr 2010 13:29:20 EDT, Jay Nakamura said:
>>
>>>>> I would have attributed the success of Ethernet to price!
>>>>>
>>>> You've got the causality wrong -- it wasn't cheap, way back when.
>>>>
>>> I remember back in '93~94ish (I think) you could get a off brand 10BT
>>> card for less than $100, as oppose to Token Ring which was $300~400.
>>> I can't remember anything else that was cheaper back then.  If you go
>>> back before that, I don't know.
>>>
>> Steve is talking mid-80s pricing, not mid-90s.  By '93 or so, the fact
>> that Ethernet was becoming ubiquitous had already forced the price down.
>>
>
> Ah, but what _caused_ Ethernet to become ubiquitous, given the price was
> initially comparable?

Early standardization.

> The only explanation I can think of is the raft
> of cheap NE2000 knock-offs that hit the market in the late 1980s, which
> gave Ethernet a major price advantage over Token Ring (the chips for
> which all vendors _had_ to buy from IBM at ridiculous cost).

Metcalf didn't make computers, whereas IBM and Datapoint did, protecting 
their captive markets cost both of them quite dearly.