How did networks get so complicated? This talk will be thought-provoking and somewhat heretical.

The original Ethernet design was a way for a few hundred computers to share the same link. It needed a clever protocol (known as CSMA/CD) to avoid having multiple computers transmitting at the same time. But these days today’s (wired) “Ethernet” does not have shared links; all the links are between two computers. Then why can’t we connect all the links with IP?

IP is a protocol in which a header in added to a packet, instructing the network which computer transmitted it, and to where it should be delivered. In1992, people noticed that the 4-byte IP address was too small, and recommended replacing it with a widely deployed (at the time) protocol known as CLNP, which had a 20-byte address. What reasons were given at the time not to do this, and is IPv6 just as good as CLNP would have been?

And sometimes, doing the wrong thing leads to good technology being developed. This talk will discuss some innovations that probably would not have been invented if the industry had don’t the “right thing”.