On 4/6/2010 10:39 PM, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
On 05 Apr 2010 12:43, valdis.kletni...@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.
