Chapter 2: Networking, Ethernet-Style

Overview

The Networked Age began for me in mid-1980, when my building at Xerox Corporation's industrial campus in Webster, NY was wired for Ethernet. I watched, fascinated, as installers pulled these stiff yellow cables, as thick as my index finger-ThickNet, they called it-through the space above the suspended ceiling, and installed 'vampire taps' (I'm not making this up!) periodically so that workstations could connect to the cable. Shortly afterward, I was taught how to access something called ARPANet, which I neither fully understood nor appreciated at the time. In the years that followed, ARPANet became the Internet-and Ethernet became the overwhelmingly dominant network technology in the world.

(A 'vampire tap,' by the way, is a little clamp with one long tooth that you could tighten around a ThickNet cable. The tooth bit through the insulation and made contact with the cable's central conductor, allowing a network connection to be made without cutting the cable. Thicknet may be dead, but vampire taps are still being used in cheap strings of Christmas lights!)

The legacy of those two concepts that I met almost at once in 1980-Ethernet and the Internet-lies everywhere in today's computer industry. Wi-Fi is in fact a flavor of Ethernet, and I'll explain that relationship in this chapter. Much of Wi-Fi is driven by a need to connect to the global Internet, and I'll explain that part of the machinery in Chapter 3. If you can get a conceptual grip on Ethernet and the Internet, you won't have any trouble grasping Wi-Fi, nor putting it together in your home or small office, and using and maintaining it over time.

Nonetheless, networking is an extremely complex subject, and I'm going to have to ask you to take a great deal of it 'on faith.' Someday I intend to write a detailed book-length introduction to Ethernet/Internet networking, but we're not there yet. For here and now, everything points to Wi-Fi, even if (on the surface) it doesn't appear to.

There is a lot to cover, so let's get going.