Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later

[Gilbert Saint-Flour]

On Thursday 08 June 2006 14:28, Chase, John wrote:

>  ... _how on earth_ Ethernet managed to gain so much market 
>  acceptance and prevail over Token-Ring. It certainly wasn't due
>  to technical superiority. (Far from it!) From what I can gather,
>  it was price, price, and ... oh yeah ... price...
> 
> So it was with VHS over BETA, TCPIP over SNA, Windows over OS/2,
> (E)ISA over MicroChannel

The last three examples were sponsored (or developed) by IBM, and many 
IBM competitors supported the non-IBM solution precisely because it was 
that, non-IBM.  In the case of Micro-channel and OS/2, licensing issues 
didn't help with PC companies like Compaq and HP.

TR also got a lot of bad press because a single PC could wreak havoc on 
the ring simply because it was configured for 4 Mb/s instead of 16 
Mb/s, and finding the culprit was sometimes quite a challenge.  
Ethernet, of course, had a lot of problems of its own, but it didn't 
have this one.

-- 

 Gilbert Saint-Flour
 GSF Software
 http://gsf-soft.com/
 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

Gilbert Saint-Flour wrote:
The last three examples were sponsored (or developed) by IBM, and many 
IBM competitors supported the non-IBM solution precisely because it was 
that, non-IBM.  In the case of Micro-channel and OS/2, licensing issues 
didn't help with PC companies like Compaq and HP.


TR also got a lot of bad press because a single PC could wreak havoc on 
the ring simply because it was configured for 4 Mb/s instead of 16 
Mb/s, and finding the culprit was sometimes quite a challenge.  
Ethernet, of course, had a lot of problems of its own, but it didn't 
have this one.


there are a whole bunch of issues.

as part of the SAA terminal emulation strategy,
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation

the T/R cards were built with per adapter thruput targeted at the 
terminal emulation market segment (say 300 PCs on the same ring).
austin had designed & built their own 4mbit t/r (16bit isa) for 
workstation environments. for rs/6000 they were forced to use the 
corporate standard 16mbit microchannel t/r card. this card had lower per 
card thruput than the pc/rt 4mbit t/r card (they weren't allowed to do 
their own 16mbit microchannel t/r card that had even the same per card 
thruput as their 4mbit 16bit ISA t/r card).


as part of moving research up the hill from sjr to alm, the new alm 
building had extensive new wiring. however, in detailed tests they were 
finding that 10mbit ethernet had higher aggregate thruput and lower 
latency over the cat5 wiring than 16mbit t/r going over the same cat5 
wiring.


in the SAA time-frame we had come up with 3-tier architecture
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier

and were out pitching it to customer executives  including examples 
showing 10mbit (cat5 wiring) ethernet deployments compared to 16mbit t/r 
deployments (using same cat5 wiring).


we were taking lots of heat from SAA forces which were actively trying 
to contain 2-tier/client-server and return the paradigm to the terminal 
emulation from the first half of the 80s (so you didn't need faster per 
card thruput because you were stuck in terminal emulation paradigm and 
you were stuck in terminal emulation paradigm because of the limited per 
card thruput).


we were also taking lots of heat from the t/r contingent. one of the t/r 
centers had published a paper showing 16mbit t/r compared to "ethernet" 
... with ethernet degrading to less than 1mbit aggregate effective 
thruput. it appeared to be using the ancient 3mbit ethernet 
specification which didn't even include listen before transmit (part of 
the 10mbit standard).


about the same time, annual acm sigcomm had a paper that did some 
detailed look at commoningly deployed ethernet. one of the tests had 30 
stations in tight low-level device driver loop transmitting minimum 
sized packets as fast as possible. In this scenario, effective aggregate 
thruput of 10mbit ethernet dropped off to 8.5mbits from a normal 
environment with effective aggregate thruput of 9.5mbits.


disclaimer: my wife is co-inventor for token passing patents (US and 
international) from the late 70s.


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Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later

[Charles Mills]

Price and also simplicity of implementation.

Price is especially significant when people are tip-toeing into something
not sure if they are going to like it - that was the case with VHS and Beta.
"I'll get one of these cheap VHS VCRs, and if I like it, I'll get a good
Beta later." Of course, once they had a library of VHS tapes, "later" never
came.

Charles




On Thursday 08 June 2006 14:28, Chase, John wrote:

>  ... _how on earth_ Ethernet managed to gain so much market 
>  acceptance and prevail over Token-Ring. It certainly wasn't due
>  to technical superiority. (Far from it!) From what I can gather,
>  it was price, price, and ... oh yeah ... price...
> 
> So it was with VHS over BETA, TCPIP over SNA, Windows over OS/2,
> (E)ISA over MicroChannel

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Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later

[Steve Davies]

VHS (victory) and BETAMAX (failure) story is about marketing and vendors
trying to exert too much control. 
In early sell through days the pricing dynamics were way different, Buying
an early AVHS fil coukld cost 70 or 80 gbp in the early days.
Also over fifty percent of titles in sell through with Cert 18 (in the UK).
The 'ahen' adult industry was quick to exploit new nedia well. Sony did not
want that kind of stuff on 'their' cartridges (and I though they were
consumer items).
Upshot was a lot of stuff was available on VHS that was not on Betamax and
it was that stuff that customers were buying at premium prices. No onew was
going to pay that amount of money for 'non premium' content'.
Foothold established, or rather feet blown off by well aimed shot from Sony
- game over.

Not much has changed has it - Blu-ray/Ipod. HD telly anyone ?

Numerous parallels in M/F world as well - one example of which is the
subject of this thread. Wow got back on on topic..

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Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:

as more environments changed from terminal emulation paradigm to
client/server paradigm ... you were starting to have server asymmetric
bandwidth requirements with individual (server) adapter card thruput
equivalent to aggregate lan thruput ... i.e. servers needed to have
thruput capacity equal to aggregate requirements of all clients.


re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#35 Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 
years later
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#36 Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 
years later


the SAA drive was controlling feature/function as part of trying to 
maintain the terminal emulation paradigm and forestall transition to 
2tier/client-server

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation

 or what we were out doing, pitching 3-tier architecture and what 
was to become middleware (we had come up with 3-tier architecture and 
was out pitching it to customer executives and taken heat from the SAA 
forces)

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier

consistent with the SAA drive and attempts to maintain the terminal 
emulation paradigm was the low per card effective thruput and 
recommended configurations with 100-300 machines sharing the same 16mbit 
t/r lan (although effective aggregate bandwidth was less than 8mbit with 
typical configurations dividing that between 100-300 machines).


for some drift, the terminal emulation paradigm would have been happy to 
stick with the original coax cable runs ... but one of the reasons for 
the transition to t/r supporting terminal emulation paradigm was that 
there were large number of installations running in lb/sq-ft loading 
problems from the overloaded long cable tray runs (there had to be 
physical cable running from the machine room to each & every terminal).


of of this tended to fence off the mainframe from participating in the 
emerging new advanced feature/functions around client/server paradigm.
enforcing the terminal emulation paradigm was resulting in the server 
feature/function being done outside of the datacenter and loads of 
datacenter corporate data leaking out to these servers.


this was what had prompted a senior person from the disk division to 
sneaking a presentation into the communication group's internal, annual 
world-wide conference, where he started out the presentation by stating 
that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise 
of the mainframe disk division. recent reference

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#4 Google Architecture

for some additional drift, we sporadically claim that the original SOA 
(service oriented architecture) implementation was the payment gateway.


we had come up with 3-tier architecture (and what was going to be called 
middleware) and had also done our ha/cmp product

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

we were later asked to consult with a small client/server startup that 
wanted to perform payment transactions on their server.


turns out that two of the people from this ha/cmp meeting
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

were now at this small client/server startup and responsible for 
something that was being called the commerce server

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn2
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn3

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Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later

[R.S.]

Charles Mills wrote:

Price and also simplicity of implementation.

Price is especially significant when people are tip-toeing into something
not sure if they are going to like it - that was the case with VHS and Beta.
"I'll get one of these cheap VHS VCRs, and if I like it, I'll get a good
Beta later." Of course, once they had a library of VHS tapes, "later" never
came.


I don't know VHS-Beta war, but in times of early LANs a cost of TR 
adapter was approx. $800, while Novell NE2000 was less than $100. That's 
the difference. For *small* networks both standards were OK. 
Additionally Eth didn't need any additional box, while TR required MAU.
Hint: it was ethernet over coaxial cable - no repeater/hub needed 
(switch was not born yet).
Novell bought Eagle company just to produce cheap networking cards. To 
make LAN available for everyone. They did the revolution.
In the best years Novell had approx. 70% of file server marketshare (and 
over 90% in Poland).


--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland

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Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 06/09/2006
   at 08:25 AM, Anne & Lynn Wheeler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:

>(there had to be physical cable running from the machine room to 
>each & every terminal)

3299.
 
-- 
 Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
 ISO position; see  
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)

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Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later

[McKown, John]

> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List 
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)
> Sent: Friday, June 09, 2006 4:51 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later
> 
> 
> In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 06/09/2006
>at 08:25 AM, Anne & Lynn Wheeler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> 
> >(there had to be physical cable running from the machine room to 
> >each & every terminal)
> 
> 3299.

And we still have some of those beasties! They connect to coax printer
protocol converters which connect to PC class laser printers. One system
left to convert, then they will be gone. 

>  
> -- 
>  Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT


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Senior Systems Programmer
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Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later

[James F Smith]

And I still have an old betamax machine which actually works..

Sony had the better product and still lost out (OS/2 & Windoze)???

James F. Smith

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of McKown, John
Sent: 12 June 2006 21:03
To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later

> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List 
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)
> Sent: Friday, June 09, 2006 4:51 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later
> 
> 
> In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 06/09/2006
>at 08:25 AM, Anne & Lynn Wheeler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> 
> >(there had to be physical cable running from the machine room to 
> >each & every terminal)
> 
> 3299.

And we still have some of those beasties! They connect to coax printer
protocol converters which connect to PC class laser printers. One system
left to convert, then they will be gone. 

>  
> -- 
>  Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT


--
John McKown
Senior Systems Programmer
HealthMarkets
Keeping the Promise of Affordable Coverage
Administrative Services Group
Information Technology

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Re: Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later

[Ted MacNEIL]

>Sony had the better product and still lost out (OS/2 & Windoze)???

The instructions said: "Windows 2000 or better".

So, I installed LINUX.

.
-teD

Marching to the beat of a different flute  

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