Seven things you might not know about Ethernet

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Ethernet was developed at Xerox PARC between 1973 and 1974, however, was commercially introduced in 1980 and standardized in 1985 as IEEE 802.3.

In 1975, Xerox filed a patent application listing Metcalfe, David Boggs, Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson as inventors.

Ethernet was originally based on the idea of computers communicating over a shared coaxial cable acting as a broadcast transmission medium.

Ethernet was inspired by ALOHAnet, which Robert Metcalfe had studied as part of his PhD dissertation. Metcalfe left Xerox in June 1979 to form 3Com.

Ethernet was named after disproven luminiferous ether as an "omnipresent, completely-passive medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves.

Before it was named Ethernet, it was known as "DIX" standard. "DIX" stands for 'Digital/Intel/Xerox". Metcalfe convinced Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and Xerox to work together to promote Ethernet as a standard and propsed 10 Mbit/s Ethernet, with 48-bit destination and source addresses and a global 16-bit Ethertype-type field.

Ethernet initially competed with two largely proprietary systems, Token Ring and Token Bus. but by the end of the 1980s, Ethernet went on to become the dominant network technology.

Source: Wikipedia