Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard, Ph.D. is an entrepreneur, philanthropist and the Father of the Cable Modem. In this interview with Ethernet Alliance chair Peter Jones for The Voices of Ethernet oral history archive, Rouzbeh reflects on how the lessons of Ethernet, specifically the focus on low cost, interoperability, and open standardization, impacted his work in creating the cable modem.

Paul Nikolich has been chair of the IEEE 802 Working Group since 2001. In this interview with Ethernet Alliance chair Peter Jones for The Voices of Ethernet oral history archive, Nikolich describes the importance of standards development and how it is an opportunity to take an idea and enable it to be deployed widely on a global scale with Ethernet as a prime example. 

Leading the IEEE 802.1 Working Group for 14 years, Tony Jeffree played a crucial role in editing numerous standards. In this part 2 interview, Jeffree continues his discussion on the importance of standards work with Ethernet Alliance chair Peter Jones for The Voices of Ethernet oral history archive.

Tony Jeffree led the IEEE 802.1 Working Group for 14 years, where he played a major role in editing numerous standards. Jeffree describes the early days of working in the evolving standards work of IEEE 802 in this part 1 interview with Ethernet Alliance chair Peter Jones for The Voices of Ethernet oral history archive.

Ethernet Networking and LAN/MAN Standards Expert

“Ethernet has been created by lots of contributors who all probably saw what was happening from a different point of view,” David Cunningham said. “We’ve all worked on different parts of the standard at different times.”

Cunningham’s personal point of view is unusually comprehensive. In more than two decades of work in local and metro area network standardization, Cunningham contributed to some of the most important milestones in and even beyond Ethernet’s evolution.

His entry into the technology space was “probably a little more accidental,” he said. Cunningham is a laser expert who did his PhD work in spectroscopy. In 1987 he joined Hewlett-Packard at its laboratories in the United Kingdom and was tasked with helping develop a physical layer for a Gigabit-speed network using single-mode optical fiber.

“For my success, I got assigned to work on the FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) standard,” he said. “… I didn’t really know about multimode fiber, and I certainly didn’t know about transmission over copper twisted pair.”

This led to Cunningham’s engagement with the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Working Group. He remembers having to be kept “calm in the technical meetings because they could be very frustrating. I was young and argumentative, and sometimes I thought that the solutions weren’t very good.”

Enjoy this wonderful conversation with Cunningham and Ethernet Alliance Chair Peter Jones.

An important aspect of Ethernet’s beginnings is that it was not simply a clever idea—it also was a necessary one.

Computer designer, architect and researcher, Gordon Bell had been with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the early 1960s where his achievements included major contributions to architecting the company’s Programmed Data Processor (PDP) line of minicomputers. He left in 1966 to join the computer-science faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and then, in 1972, returned to DEC as vice president of engineering. In this role, Bell oversaw development of DEC’s historic Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) computers.

The VAX line would prove hugely popular in the scientific research communities and influential in bringing about the computer age across varied industries which had sought a less expensive and more flexible and nimble computing capability than previously available. But a key problem had to be solved: how to connect the devices.

Waves are still rippling from the splashes that Rich Seifert made over the course of his decades in creation and evolution of Ethernet. In 1979 and ’80, while he was with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Seifert worked alongside engineers from Intel and Xerox to cowrite, “The Ethernet, A Local Area Network. Data Link Layer and Physical Layer Specifications,” the seminal document which greatly informed the initial IEEE Project 802 standardization activities. He went on to play instrumental roles also in development of 10 Megabit per second (Mbps) Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet.

Along the way, Seifert was responsible for the architecture and design of a wide range of network products, as well as a lengthy list of books and papers that introduced or furthered all sorts of interesting ideas across and beyond the ecosystem—“ether-not,” for example, is Seifert’s term for technologies that fail to deliver Ethernet’s unique and differentiating combination of attributes.

Robert Garner has 41 years of experience in management, architecture and design engineering across product development and research at Xerox Systems Development, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Sun Microsystems, Brocade Communications and IBM Research. From that remarkable career, he has preserved a slew of stories and an impressive collection of relics, and he’s thrilled to share them.

Garner was working toward his master’s at Stanford University in 1977 when an on-campus interview with Bob Metcalfe led to his being hired into the Xerox Systems Development Division. Metcalfe was putting together a team to productize Ethernet and the experimental Alto workstation designed by Xerox PARC. In that heady environment, Garner co-designed the 10-Mbps Ethernet adapter and CPU hardware for the groundbreaking Xerox Star 8010 Profession Workstation, the first commercial personal computer incorporating the fundamental technologies that have come to be standard in mainstream PCs.

It was an era of lively lunches and late nights among brilliant colleagues. “We were so passionate,” Garner said. “I would ride my bike to PARC and back to the apartment I was staying in, and I would ride back by a cemetery at 2 in the morning. It was pretty spooky.”

He went on to design or manage a tremendous list of innovations during his career—several of them milestone enablers in Ethernet’s evolution into the foundation of networking globally.

Geoff Thompson has been part of the IEEE 803.3 Ethernet Working Group since 1983, and he chaired it from 1993 until 2002, a period in which standards innovations such as 1000-BASE-T and Gigabit Ethernet “effectively cemented Ethernet as the top dog in wired LANs (local area networks).”

But his connection with the technology and its inventors goes even further back. “I was a very, very early customer of Ethernet.” At Xerox Research in 1974, he was working on laser printing when David Boggs, a co-inventor of Ethernet, introduced Thompson and his colleagues to an early implementation of the technology for connecting computers in their labs. “So I was an early user of the experimental internet.” 

Robert M. Grow calls himself “a latecomer to Ethernet,” but, in fact, he has been involved in the technology for its entire existence. He was immersed in the design of the first local area networks (LANs) in the 1970s, and, even during his university years, Grow “got involved looking at some of the more advanced and more futuristic looks at technology and things that would be happening,” he tells Ethernet Alliance chair Peter Jones for The Voices of Ethernet oral-history archive.