ABSTRACT
The first report describing the use of LANs to increase an employee’s productivity, efficiency, and sharing of expensive resources (including use of obsolete computers/resources) was given in Metacalfe’s Ph.D. Dissertation at MIT in 1973. Later on, he — along with David Boggs and others working at Xerox Corporation — developed the first LAN, known as
Ethernet
(a trademark of Xerox Corporation). This Ethernet was adopted by various companies, and Intel built a single-chip controller for it. Thus, Ethernet became a
de facto
standard for LANs and is characterized as a non-deterministic LAN, known commercially as
DIX
(derived from the specification document jointly published by Digital, Intel, and Xerox in 1980). DIX is based on the ALOHA Radio Network developed at the University of Hawaii. It operates over coaxial cable, fiber-optic cable, and twisted-pair cable and offers a throughput of 10 Mbps. It is based on a bus topology and uses the CSMA/CD access method to access the network. The Ethernet LAN is considered the basis for the International Standards Organization (ISO) to define various standard LANs, resulting in the introduction of OSI-RM followed by IEEE 802 standard LANs.
