First Ethernet in Australia 1982

How did this come about?

During the 1970s the use of computers for commercial and academic work grew substantially. The method of accessing computers was essentially by serial lines with speeds ranging up to 9600 bps (bits per second) for individual users and up to 48 kbps for inter-computer connections. Serial lines were slow, point to point and expensive, which resulted in considerable research and development into a wide range of technologies and protocols to improve data communications including Token Ring, FDDI and ARCNET.

We know the story of Bob Metcalf’s first thoughts (with others) about ethernet in 1973 which resulted in a patent in 1975. He formed the company 3COM in 1979 to further develop and market ethernet products. Ethernet was finally ratified as a standard in 1983 by the IEEE as 802.3.

What you may not know is that in November 1981, The ACS (Australian Computer Society) and IFIP TC6 (International Federation for Information Processing, Technical Committee 6, Data Communications) organised the COMTAP 81 conference in Sydney, Australia, where among the many notable speakers was Bob Metcalf. 

The Director of the Prentice Computer Centre, UQ at the time was Alan Coulter who was also a member of both ACS and IFIP TC6. To gain the maximum benefit from this conference he wanted as many of his staff as possible to attend. So three of us drove to Sydney from Brisbane to stretch a tight budget as far as we could. 

At one of the social gatherings (which possibly may have involved a quantity of wine), Bob remarked that he had been in Australia for some days and not seen a kangaroo or a koala - they don’t exist! Bob - mate - if you want to see Australian animals you need to get out of the city. We are driving back to Brisbane this weekend, come with us and we'll show you the real Australia. Well, a day or so later Bob told us that he had delayed his flight back to the US by a few days and was leaving from Brisbane. We did indeed show him kangaroos, koalas and emus, had a surf at the Gold Coast, a visit to UQ and a BBQ on our balcony before sending him back home.

The net result was that, with Bob’s help, UQ purchased some 3COM Unibus Ethernet controllers and DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) gave us their experimental software. DEC was working with 3COM evaluating this technology at the time and hence had an interest in the practical use of Ethernet in a tertiary education and research organisation.

This first experimental Ethernet in 1982 was between a DEC PDP 11/34 and a VAX 780 over ‘thick’ yellow Ethernet coaxial cable, which attracted a lot of attention draped along a corridor in the UQ Computer Centre. 'It’s so fast it makes the cable sag' - but no one really believed that story. Ethernet soon became embedded into the UQ data network. In addition to coaxial cable, UQ also ran ethernet over multimode optical fibre beginning in 1984. 

The original specification was for transmission at 10 Mbps (mega bits per second). The physical medium was 50 ohm coaxial cable, which was coloured yellow for identification, with a maximum length of 2,500 m with repeaters every 500 m segment. Much has been written about the development of Ethernet, a good place to start is Wikipedia.