"An ethernet packet is an ethernet packet, doesn't matter what brand of gear put it on the wire"
I spent the bulk of my professional career selling network test equipment so I know a thing or two, this is a bit out of my wheelhouse but I'm sure I can figure it out. The instrument panel on the 336 is huge but I think the take away is the digital controls will allow more options so worth the investment.
Warning computer nerd wall of text. Boat guys ignore
That's interesting. You're talking to the guy who, along with
avb@sun.com (Sun employee #1), made 100mbit ethernet a thing. I was the lead on Sun's first cluster project, internal name was sunbox, and the word got around and all sorts of people would show up at my office to pitch their stuff to be part of my product. This was back in the 10Mbit ethernet and 100Mbit FDDI days. I hated FDDI, would have loved it if the packet format was ethernet, it wasn't. I tried to get Sun's hardware guys to give me 100Mbit ethernet, I didn't communicate what I wanted correctly. What I wanted was ethernet packets at a faster speed. What they heard me asking was to make 100Mbit signal the same way that 10Mbit signaled which is not possible because of crosstalk or something. I could have cared less if they signaled however, I just wanted ethernet packets on a faster wire.
Roll forward a few months and some guys from Crescendo come pitch something they called CDDI, it was FDDI over copper at 100mbit. I listened, said wait here, went and got Andy, who trusted me because I had showed him enough data that he redesigned one of the workstation memory interconnects, I think it was SS20 but might have been ultrasparc, it's been 30 years. Whatever, I had enough information that Andy didn't have and he redesigned a big part of a machine because of me. And Andy knew I wanted 100Mbit ethernet.
So I dragged him into the conference room and said "do the pitch again". And they did, and Andy asked some questions, he was a way better hardware guy than I am, I've done some but I'm mostly software. We walk back to our offices, we sat right next to each other, and he said "So, CDDI not so much, but we know now how to signal at 100Mbit over copper, I'm thinking 100Mbit ethernet, right?" Yep.
Nobody knows that Andy and I were behind 100Mbit because at the time, Sun was winning at everything. They had the VM system with mmap that worked, everyone else was catching up. mmap working meant those small memory machines had 2x the effective size. They had done a RISC chip in 20K gates that worked and worked well, other people were catching up. They did NFS and everyone had to do NFS.
The computer vendors *hated* Sun because they were constantly playing catch up. Not Sun's fault but the idea that yet another thing was coming from Sun was a non starter in Andy's mind.
So Andy and I, mostly Andy but he explained the hardware details enough that I could get the point across, drove to every networking company in the valley, and said "So, do you know it is possible to signal over copper at 100Mbit? Here is how you do it. Wouldn't it be neat if we could have 100Mbit ethernet?" Truth be told, it was mostly Andy because he was famous as a Sun founder, I was somewhat known but nothing like he was. My part was wanting 100mbit ethernet and finding a way to do it. I talked to a few companies that would listen to me, Andy talked to the big boys.
6 months later we had multiple 100Mbit ethernet cards and hubs. Switches followed.
And today? Yeah, we have 100Gbit cards and they are working on 400Gbit cards. Once they got the idea, they ran with it. But that was my idea. I don't really care that the world doesn't know I was behind that, I just love that the industry finally saw the light and ran with it. My reward is I can buy 5 port 10/100/1000 switches for $20. I predict that if I hadn't pushed it, someone else would have, it just makes so much sense, but who knows? At the time, the future was FDDI and ATM. Sure would suck if that's the world we ended up with.
