A Brief History of Ethernet

Like many early networking protocols, Ethernet began life inside a corporation that was looking to solve a specific problem. Xerox needed an effective way to allow a new invention, called the personal computer, to be connected in its offices. From that, Ethernet was born. (Go to http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa111598.htm for an interesting story on the history of Ethernet.) Eventually, Xerox teamed with Intel and Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) to further develop Ethernet, so the original Ethernet became known as DIX Ethernet, referring to DEC, Intel, and Xerox.

These companies willingly transitioned the job of Ethernet standards development to the IEEE in the early 1980s. The IEEE formed two committees that worked directly on Ethernet—the IEEE 802.3 committee and the IEEE 802.2 committee. The 802.3 committee worked on physical layer standards as well as a subpart of the data link layer called Media Access Control (MAC). The IEEE assigned the other functions of the data link layer to the 802.2 committee, calling this part of the data link layer the Logical Link Control (LLC) sublayer. (The 802.2 standard applied to Ethernet as well as to other IEEE standard LANs such as Token Ring.)