This is a big year for 40th anniversaries.
We’ve “celebrated” (or at least acknowledged) the 40th anniversary of the mobile phone, and it’s also the 40th anniversary of Ethernet. It’s hard to think of any recent developments that so fundamentally changed the way the world works – economically, socially, and politically – more so than these two, especially Ethernet, which has been such a major factor in the availability of the Internet and corporate intranets, ushering us into the digital age.
Ethernet continues to be the standard for on-premise networking. Even manufacturing has adopted Ethernet (with some modifications), which has been a long time in coming. But now they’re using it for the error free, guaranteed delivery with predictable delivery latency that manufacturing applications demand.
While it now seems inevitable that Ethernet would rule, but back in the day, it had competition from Token Ring and Token Bus technology. But while Ethernet was open and standardized, Token Ring and Token Bus were largely proprietary. (Hmmm. Where have we seen this one before? Maybe VCR vs. BetaMax? Although in that case BetaMax was clearly the superior technology, while in the networking world the edge was held by Ethernet.)
EE Times, by the way, got there just in time to follow the development of the Ethernet (and mobile phones). They observed their 40th late in 2012.
On the less techie front, 2013 is also the 40th anniversary of Deep Purple’s most famous song, Smoke on the Water .
If you clicked on the link – and you should – I’m not putting in a plug here for AT&T Mobile Share – or for Deep Purple, even though this is one of rock’s most classic guitar riffs. I’ve got it in here on behalf of all the middle-aged dads out there. (I’m pretty sure most of you can identify with this ad.)
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The hyperlink above should work, but this URL will take you to there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-IdrVvYOg )