Ethernet
DEC, Intel and Xerox publish Ethernet Version 1.0
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The document announcing a common networking design also warned that even DEC’s, Intel’s and Xerox’s own products might deviate from it.
A document dated 30 September 1980
Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel and Xerox jointly published Version 1.0 of “The Ethernet: A Local Area Network—Data Link Layer and Physical Layer Specifications,” dated 30 September 1980.
It converted work on an earlier Xerox prototype into a shared, multi-company design reference covering both layers. Publication itself was the day’s change: not a first installation, and not a product.
What Version 1.0 fixed
The specification called for Manchester encoding at 10 million bits per second, over a network spanning up to 2.5 kilometres with as many as 1,024 stations.
Its frame used six-octet destination and source addresses, a two-octet protocol-type field, 46 to 1,500 data octets and a four-octet frame-check sequence — a valid frame of 64 to 1,518 octets, limits still recognizable in Ethernet decades later.
Not Ethernet II, not 802.3
This was DIX Version 1.0. “Ethernet II” normally refers to the superseding DIX Version 2.0, published in 1982, so calling the September 1980 output the Ethernet II frame format misnames it.
Ethernet also already existed experimentally at Xerox PARC, initially at roughly 3 Mbit/s. What 1980 added was a 10-Mbit/s multi-vendor design.
The three-company specification was then offered to the newly formed IEEE 802 group; IEEE’s first Ethernet standard, 802.3, followed in 1983.
Sources
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